Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  By then he was the most famous ancient historian in the world, and his views counted. He had come a long way from Syracuse; he had single-handedly conquered the Old World. When in June 1986 Mary died after a long illness, he sat for a few hours in the house they had built together in the heart of Cambridge, and died where they had lived.

  26. Hugh Trevor-Roper

  Some called him the Trope. A trope is a figure of speech, and it was a nickname, since he was notoriously fond of them. ‘This elaborate trope,’ Hugh Trevor-Roper once wrote to his beloved mentor Bernard Berenson in 1952, playfully excusing a metaphor that had got out of hand. It can also mean something added to a liturgy as a musical embellishment, which is apt too, since he was a stylist among English historians of his day. Rivals sometimes called him a journalist, meaning he wrote well. A big man with a big voice, he could be witty and waspish in talk and print and greedy for scandal: ‘What’s the dirt on him?’

  As a fifteen-year-old schoolboy he came upon Milton’s Nativity Ode and found that English, if you knew how to handle it, can sound orchestral. Macaulay had noticed it a century before. Hugh commended his influence, though he found his optimism a touch vulgar at times, and revived the tempo of his style and much of his substance. Both were masters of brisk contention and the vivid, compelling character-sketch, since the past is a gallery of characters. Both were Whigs, venerating ancient forms and constitutions which, as they insisted, can prove more radical than any revolution. Nations change enduringly not by shattering ancient forms but by working through them and within them, as the English monarchy changed over the centuries from a Stuart tyranny to a ceremonial and advisory role. Reform, as Macaulay told the House of Commons in 1831, that you may preserve.

  Hugh’s life (1914-2003) spanned the years when revolutions were tried over and over again and seen spectacularly to fail. There were two Russian revolutions when he was three, and in January 1933, in his freshman year at Oxford, Hitler seized power in Germany. Hugh, who is said to have learned German in order to read ancient historians like Wilamowitz, used it to read Mein Kampf, and before he was thirty he was working for British Special Intelligence monitoring German wartime radio. Then in April 1945 Hitler, another failed revolutionary, killed himself.

  Student days were something he preferred not to speak of, but some recall him as an undergraduate leader of those who opposed war and favoured appeasement. It was probably Winston Churchill, that old radical elected to the Commons in Victorian times, that drew him to a love of the heroic where history became a matter of great lives and a public clash of wills. As an historian he always disdained the severely specialised and the dryly statistical. The past was a drama, even a melodrama, with conspiracies and scandals. It could be outrageous or sublime: the merely archival did not interest him. ‘Dull,’ he would remark briefly if you mentioned someone who did it. As a young man, at Asquith’s dinner party in Downing Street, Churchill had once called himself a glow-worm, and Hugh would have agreed. He had to shine.

  It is odd he never looked or sounded Old Hat, and his face in his middle years, which was large, smooth and brown, had the gift of keeping him young. I first encountered him in post-war Oxford in the days of austerity, a young don widely associated with high jinks, smashing pianos and breaking glass with titled friends, though his own northern origins were fairly ordinary. He is said to have woken a whole college quadrangle in the small hours by charging in with a bunch of drunken cronies in white ties, Hugh blowing a hunting horn. Very Brideshead. Evelyn Waugh once wrote a novel to mourn the passing of that enchanted world, but nobody had told Hugh. He adored the witty, the well-connected and the beautiful, rejoiced in blood sports, and appeared one term on a lecture-platform encased top-down in a hard shell of plaster after a hunting fall. It fitted the role.

  He adored celebrities. My most vivid memory is lunching with him at a table for four al fresco in Los Angeles in December 1964 with Olivia de Havilland and George Cukor; he had just lectured on the English civil war to a Hollywood audience, and the invited company looked vastly titillated by the presence of the great, the good and the notorious. The talk at lunch was about the Earl Warren report on the recent death of President Kennedy, with Miss de Havilland remarking: ‘In Paris we’re saying it’s all a complôt, and we’re not going to say anything about it.’ Hugh replied vehemently: ‘I’m saying it’s all a complôt and we are going to say something about it.’ George Cukor later offered to drive me back to town, though I did not go.

  By that time the image of academe had been suddenly transformed, and the dim dons despised by Evelyn Waugh had given place to stars. ‘You have the perfect life,’ a freshman once remarked, to my amazement. I had been brought up to believe life only began outside the college gate; anyone who chose claustration, I imagined, must be a muff. Paperbacks and television soon changed all that. Hugh’s left-wing rival A. J. P. Taylor was lecturing confidently without notes on the small screen about Habsburgs, Bismarck and two world wars; kings and battles were back. No tired commuter wants to hear about the dialectical process or rates of population growth, and style had won.

  So had historians with style. In 1849 Macaulay began to publish a bestselling history of England celebrating the Glorious Revolution of 1689, in the very year Karl Marx settled in London with other matters on his mind. Marx wrote dull books, but their dullness proved a defence, while in the long run Macaulay’s verve and clarity came near to being the ruin of him. Like all good writing it looked glib and facile. Das Kapital, by contrast, was unread, as the young Bernard Shaw discovered when he joined the Fabians in London in the 1880s; he had toiled through it in French in the British Museum, and his fellow-Fabians were awestruck when he told them what he had done. He was the only one who had. That was a bit of luck for Marx and Engels, whose predictions about the coming proletarian revolution proved to be crackpot and whose demands for racial extermination, though praised and acted on by Stalin and Hitler, passed blissfully unnoticed among the faithful. There is a lot to be said, unless you are trying to live by your pen, for writing a big, dull, unreadable book packed with tables of figures. It looks so serious.

  Hugh was not interested in being thought serious. Like Macaulay he wanted to startle and amuse. Macaulay shone at dinner-parties in great houses where people asked questions like ‘Where did you get that style?’ Churchill the glow-worm was another model. Brilliance does not forbid a steely sense of purpose; and it may help, as it helped Churchill, to be the grandson of a duke. Neither Macaulay nor Trevor-Roper had that advantage, but at least they could dine with celebrities and drop their names.

  Though he brought the sensational and the scandalous back into academic history, Hugh was never merely a populariser. But he was read, and to read him was to share his pride in a parliamentary tradition that had triumphed over Louis XIV, Napoleon and Hitler – tyrants who had challenged the triple cord (as Edmund Burke called it) of King, Lords and Commons. Their defeat had proved Burke right: ‘the triple cord that no man can break.’ No man ever did. No other large power on earth achieved democracy and an industrial revolution without bloodshed, so the Whig interpretation of history explains something no other interpretation even attempts to explain. England achieved all that not by guillotining its aristocracy but by employing them, and against the French terror and Hitler’s mass-murderers it fought and triumphed as a nation, welcoming the oppressed from the lands of the tyrants and loading them with honours and obligations.

  ____

  The point was not seen instantly but realised over time, and Hugh’s adolescent years are undocumented and shadowy. By the mid-1930s politics was everything, and an affair with a fellow student, a contemporary once told me, was thought to be remarkable not because they were of the same sex but because his lover was left-wing. The Left repelled Hugh from the start, above all in its fatal addiction to cant and moral self-congratulation, and he tells in his diary how, as Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia mounted, he was sho
cked to hear an Oxford classics don insist that since politics is all morality, no strategic interests are ever to be heeded or heard. ‘I listened to these follies with silent contempt and indignation.’ The nebulously humanitarian excited only derision. Nations (like individuals) have a perfect right to pursue an interest, and the first and last duty is to survive. That defined his stance for the rest of a long life. The Churchill premiership in 1940-5 was in the Whig tradition of Chatham and Burke, though unfortunately without a party to sustain it, and Churchill was descended from Marlborough, who defeated Louis XIV. What is more, he had style.

  ____

  Hugh, by contrast, was without lineage, but at style he shone. His first book, a life of Archbishop Laud in 1940, drew the attention of Logan Pearsall Smith, an Oxford American living in ample style in London who, for a time, made the young man his legatee and let him read his books. That linked him to an enviably talented network of celebrities. Logan was the brother-in-law of Bernard Berenson and Bertrand Russell, whose acquaintance sharpened Hugh’s awareness of where a literary life might lead. Dukes, alas, can be tedious. ‘Socially I am a snob,’ he wrote in ‘Autopsy,’ but unfortunately the possessors of ancient titles can be colossal bores. ‘I am continually disgusted by the triviality and vulgarity of the great world.’ His years in British intelligence during the war left him with few illusions about the pretensions of rank and power, though he still aspired to both, and in 1954, a bachelor of forty, he married Lady Alexandra Haig after a bitter divorce. By 1979 he was Lord Dacre, and in 1980 he was elected master of Peterhouse, the oldest of Cambridge colleges. But though grander and grander he never ceased altogether to feel an outsider, and preferred refugees and iconoclasts to hereditary peers, as if the polite world forever distrusted him and would never unreservedly let him in.

  ____

  At least he was famous. With The Last Days of Hitler (1947), which appeared in his thirty-third year, he was (as he cheerfully put it) a vulgar success. It was a sensational book on a sensational topic, and it appeared only two years after the cataclysmic events it described. Stalin believed he had an interest in promoting doubts about Hitler’s death; his Western allies, by contrast, wished the matter to be laid to rest. Hugh had half a century and more to live, and the book never went out of print in his lifetime. It displays to masterly effect the lofty convictions and lively prejudices of its youthful author.

  They were engaging prejudices for a young man in love with the past. He adored courts, and Hitler had a court. He despised upstarts, and Hitler was an upstart. He detested superstition as a man of the Enlightenment, and Hitler was monumentally superstitious. He scorned half-baked ideology, and National Socialism was incontestably that. Marxism could at least claim to be a century old; it had attracted distinguished minds and seemed mysteriously impervious to the objection that there had been no class wars. Just you wait, it answered, like a sect dedicated to the Second Coming, just you wait. When the Nazis seized power in January 1933, by contrast, their dogma was barely a decade old and lasted only a dozen more years. As for cant, which Hugh loathed, Nazism was cant personified, with a leader of no background, no education worth speaking of and no manners. It was not just evil. It was vulgar.

  Whatever historians may say or do, the Last Days is a great book. It was written (as Gibbon and Macaulay wrote) outside academic conventions, and Hugh, who lived into his eighties, never wrote a better. His later biographies are well performed but about nonentities, and he only won his chance to shine because in occupied Germany in September 1945 he had sounded off ignorantly, as he once told me, about the last days in the bunker and was promptly ordered to write it. Soviet rumours were circulating: that the British were harbouring Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress; that Hitler was in hiding, here and there; that Himmler had been sighted, or Martin Bormann. Everything he had once confidently proclaimed in conversation, he once told me, proved to be wrong. His task had not been to write a masterpiece but to clear the air and get it right; and in a long introduction to the second edition he scrupulously cited his sources and answered his detractors. In the event he got it right and wrote a masterpiece too.

  Instant history is not much esteemed in academe, if only because it lacks materials to sift and conclusions to ponder. Hugh was on any count an outsider, and his qualifications as a modern historian were unremarkable. A classicist by training, his grasp of modern languages was modest and only recently acquired, and he had little experience of modern politics and no affinity with the German mind, which as a lover of Mediterranean lands he fervently despised. Instant history is best accomplished by those who have played a role; Caesar’s commentaries and Clarendon’s history of the English civil war are works by leaders who were there. If they lie and suppress, they do so as witnesses to the events they describe. The Last Days of Hitler is more like a journalistic sketch with impressions hastily grabbed and guesses executed with speed and certainty. If it were a painting, you would wonder if the paint had dried.

  Journalistic verve has its charms. So has certainty. Lord Melbourne, Victoria’s first prime minister, once remarked he wished he were as sure of anything as Macaulay was of everything, and Hugh wrote in that cocksure tradition. The Last Days is a cheeky book. If there were doubts in Hugh’s mind they do not survive into the printed text. Fortunately he was already an aspiring journalist, and journalism is a great and complex art. Anyone who knows academe knows that a spell of it improves your style no end. To write under the threat of instant censure – to be professionally ‘subbed down’ by an experienced subeditor – is just what a young author needs. A cold-shower discipline, it has rigours more demanding than any university press, a tussle from which the beginner emerges slimmer, fitter and smarter.

  ____

  Hugh’s friendship with Logan Pearsall Smith, meanwhile, had led him to his brother-in-law near Florence. His Letters from Oxford (2006), written from 1947 until Berenson’s (‘BB’) death in 1959, show how providential that friendship was. They are brash, exuberant and affectionate. Recent biographers have not much shaken Hugh’s ardent view that BB was ‘a very great man.’ He too had a court – one he had made for himself, living in state in a large hillside villa in the Tuscan hills filled with Renaissance paintings acquired after years of art-dealing with rich collectors. There is no conclusive evidence he ever knowingly gave a false attribution or cheated a client. Exiled far from his beloved Harvard, the sage of Settignano was greedy for gossip and loved to hear of English colleges which produced, as he felt, more finished scholars than Ivy League. He adored scandal and wanted more and more of it. It was given. ‘Hugh is a good talker,’ BB decided, ‘a fine historian, but above all a superb letter-writer.’

  Posterity is bound to agree. When I first stayed in the Villa I Tatti, which was in 1970, and in Logan’s room – da Logan – as the grateful guest of a generous Harvard, BB had been dead for a decade, bequeathing it to his old university along with his books, his paintings, six farms and nearly two million dollars. To Harvard, where I had not yet lectured, I owe much, but not (as a latecomer) a glimpse of its presiding genius or the letters of his friends.

  It is easy to see why Hugh’s head was turned. He was already in love with Italy and already adored intellectual power-games and the scandals of the rich, the titled and the celebrated. His letters were much spoken of when I arrived at the villa, but they were locked away in the vaults of a Milan bank where the eye of the pious or the prying could not find them. It is a revelation to read them now. They deal among other matters with Hugh’s affair with a married woman who had divorced an admiral to marry him. BB, who had married a divorcée years before, made a highly sympathetic confidant, and I was shown the woods and gardens where he had paced with Hugh and heard his detailed account of court proceedings. In 1954 Hugh promptly married Xandra and brought her to I Tatti. Seven years his senior, she dressed well and had brains and style; her mother, the daughter of a Scottish earl, had been lady-in-waiting to Queen Alex
andra, and she had received her name by royal permission – a courtly connection – abbreviating it by two syllables. Her signature, accordingly, began stylishly with an X.

  Hugh was in his element. He was a famous historian working at full pitch and ready for anything: demolishing theories about the role of the English gentry in the seventeenth century and celebrating such continental historians as Jacob Burckhardt of Basel, who in 1860 wrote The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, and Fernand Braudel, who in 1949 made the whole of Mediterranean culture his canvas. Such masters had dared to make totality their theme. England, Hugh felt, was provincial. He held Lewis Namier, a Polish immigrant, to be the greatest living British historian, and derided colleagues who wrote stuffy articles for learned journals and hunted details from manuscripts in dusty places.

  He loved games too, and under the pen-name Mercurius Oxoniensis he mocked the student militants of the Sixties and the antics of dons who inexpertly battled with them. In 1968-70, at the height of the troubles, weekly articles appeared in the Spectator, and though they were technically anonymous few ever doubted they were Hugh’s. Written at the suggestion of the editor, Nigel Lawson, later Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Thatcher government, they were composed as a parody of seventeenth-century prose that was entirely Hugh’s idea. He had been elected regius professor of modern history at Oxford in his early forties, but he had no intention of letting that dignity cramp his style. An academic establishment had behaved absurdly, as he believed, and it had earned any derision he could muster.