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From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution
This collection is the third in a series which gathers the best historical essays of Hugh Trevor-Roper, considered by many the unequalled master of the form.
The pieces here range from an account of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's mission in China in the sixteenth century to a discussion of the Anglo-Scottish Union. They include essays on medicine at the early Stuart Court, on the plunder of artistic treasures in Europe during the wars of the seventeenth century, on the plans of Hugo Grotius to create a new universal church on an Anglican base, on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and religious toleration thereafter. There are also biographical studies of Archbishop Laud, Matthew Wren, the Earl of Clarendon, and Prince Rupert.
As Noel argument wrote in Our Age , Hugh Trevor-Roper has "perfected the historical essay as the most beguiling form of enlightening readers about the past. He is the most eloquent, sophisticated and assured historian of Our Age, and has never written an inelegant sentence or produced an incoherent arguement."
The pieces here range from an account of the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's mission in China in the sixteenth century to a discussion of the Anglo-Scottish Union. They include essays on medicine at the early Stuart Court, on the plunder of artistic treasures in Europe during the wars of the seventeenth century, on the plans of Hugo Grotius to create a new universal church on an Anglican base, on the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and religious toleration thereafter. There are also biographical studies of Archbishop Laud, Matthew Wren, the Earl of Clarendon, and Prince Rupert.
As Noel argument wrote in Our Age , Hugh Trevor-Roper has "perfected the historical essay as the most beguiling form of enlightening readers about the past. He is the most eloquent, sophisticated and assured historian of Our Age, and has never written an inelegant sentence or produced an incoherent arguement."
348 pages, Hardcover
First published April 27, 1992
35 people want to read
About the author
Hugh Trevor-Roper
122 books59 followersHugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.
Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Philipps Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (2014): "The bulk of his publications is formidable ... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them ... have lastingly transformed their fields." On the other hand, his biographer Adam Sisman also writes that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed."
Trevor-Roper's most commercially successful book was titled The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler's bunker. From interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents, he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.
Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" in 1983 when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.
Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Philipps Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". This is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper (2014): "The bulk of his publications is formidable ... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them ... have lastingly transformed their fields." On the other hand, his biographer Adam Sisman also writes that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed."
Trevor-Roper's most commercially successful book was titled The Last Days of Hitler (1947). It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler's bunker. From interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents, he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin. He also showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries.
Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" in 1983 when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 7, 2012
Perhaps I've simply overdosed on Trevor-Roper essays, or perhaps it is just the amount overlap between them, but they have been tending to blur together in my mind. But a solid collection of essays overall.
Essays:
A Spiritual Conquest? Matteo Ricci in China
Sustaining an Empire: Two Spanish Imperial Statesmen
Medicine at the Early Stuart Court
Hugo Grotius and England
The Church of England and the Greek Church in the Time of Charles I
The Plunder of the Arts in the Seventeenth Century
Archbishop Laud in Retrospect
Little Pope Regulus: Matthew Wren, Bishop of Norwich and Ely
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon
Prince Rubert, the Cavalier
The Continuity of the English Revolution
The Glorious Revolution of 1688
Our First Whig Historian: Paul de Rapin-Thoyras
Religious Toleration in England after 1688
The Anglo-Scottish Union
Essays:
A Spiritual Conquest? Matteo Ricci in China
Sustaining an Empire: Two Spanish Imperial Statesmen
Medicine at the Early Stuart Court
Hugo Grotius and England
The Church of England and the Greek Church in the Time of Charles I
The Plunder of the Arts in the Seventeenth Century
Archbishop Laud in Retrospect
Little Pope Regulus: Matthew Wren, Bishop of Norwich and Ely
Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon
Prince Rubert, the Cavalier
The Continuity of the English Revolution
The Glorious Revolution of 1688
Our First Whig Historian: Paul de Rapin-Thoyras
Religious Toleration in England after 1688
The Anglo-Scottish Union
September 9, 2023
In my days as a an undergraduate history student at Sydney University in the late 1970s (when dinosaurs roamed the earth), one of the tier 1 predator historians was Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Even then he was highly controversial. One reason for that appeared then, and appears more clearly now, because he exercised his undoubted intelligence not only in doing his own work but also in trenchant and sometimes vituperative criticism of the work of others. That criticism was often embellished with words rarely seen and almost never understood (there is little doubt that Trevor-Roper's criticisms were quite devastating to those criticised in part because they were delivered with a combination of human superiority and a lack of delicacy which more fragile egos found difficult to accept). Trevor-Roper assumed that the behaviour that was accepted at the Oxford Union was equally acceptable in academic discourse in the late 20th century.
In part, Trevor-Roper's position was also affected by his, apparently deliberate, determination to attempt to be the leading "Annales" historian in the Anglophone world. The Annales school of historiography raised among many English-speaking historians, a kind of visceral distrust of French academia. While Febre and Bloch might be accepted as superb historians in their own right, subsequent leading French Annalistes, like Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie appeared to many stodgy Anglo-Saxons to have strayed far from history into a kind of multidisciplinary psychodrama centring on the almost indefinable concept of "mentalité".
From his pedastle as the English Annaliste, Trevor-Roper dispensed his desecating scorn on Whig, Tory, Marxist and Stubbsian alike, pillorying the rigid mental structures of one and the dull and dusty philology of others. It won him few friends.
But what of his work?
Trevor-Roper's books never had the power of a sustained synthesis and argument to match Bloch'sFeudal Society (let alone Braudel's Mediterranean World). However, his articles and papers were brilliant intellectual tours de force which managed to synthesise in fine Annaliste style several (and sometimes many) strands of enquiry enabling the reader to glance inside the perspective of the people of the time, and to understand the events of the time, their causes and effects at several levels at once with a real appreciation of the understandings of the then contemporary participant or observer.
One might suggest that Trevor-Roper was to history as D.H. Lawrence was to literature - the more space he provided for himself to develop his ideas, the less effective was the result. He was a master of the historical short story, but the space of the novel defeated his abilities. Perhaps he was a man with a brilliant and perceptive mind rather than one that could engage in long-term research leading to equally brilliant synthesis overr a broad canvasss in space and/or time.
This collection of his later essays on the period from the late 16th century to the early 18th demonstrates Trevor-Roper's talents at their best. The narrow subject and the limited space of each of the 15 articles allows him to draw together multiple strands and to provide a unique and enlightening synthesis which, even if wrong, has the enduring benefit of being itself human and treating the participants in history as humans.
It is an enriching experience, some 40 years or more after I first encountered Trevor-Roper's work and now that even the Hitler Diaries are forgotten (along with Lord Faker), to return and read the work that he left for us to consider. On the whole, it stands up well. Its strengths remain as strong as ever. Its weaknesses are less palpable because the personalities criticised by Trevor-Roper, who would have originally been offended, are, like the author, creatures of history. Whatever substance the criticisms had when made remains, but their caustic delivery is now jejune if not uncouth.
There are, of course, the kinds of weaknesses from which every historians suffers: the mastery that they have of their particular epoque tempts them to contrast that epoque with its predecessors and successors, in relation to which their knowledge is little better than that of the average educated reader. The supposed contrasts and differences are often in the nature of straw men. The arguments are those not with the author's own generation but generations past and not of academia but of the newspapers. It is one thing to provide an understanding of Archbishop Laud that is new and interesting and puts him in a new and different light. It is another thing to attempt to contrast Laud with the leaders of the mediaeval church or with John Wesley, where the picture of the mediaeval fathers or of Wesley is that of the writer's childhood and not that of current scholarship (especially by those who seek the same synthesis in their studies).
However, if you are interested in the period of what may be described as the "long" 17th-century, then it is worth spending the day or two required to read and reflect on this collection of essays. They may not convince you, but they will force you to consider whether you need to revisit your views of that time. Also keep a good dictionary beside you, Trevor-Roper loved showing off his vocabulary.
The final essay is itself now a historical document - in 1975 Trevor-Roper looked at the Act of Union in light of the then-emerging Scottish nationalist movement. To consider these observations in the light of the experience of Britain since that time, particularly the Scottish devolution that was provided by the Blair government, the Scottish independence referendum and its debates and result and the curious Brexit experience demonstrates how difficult it is to identify the lessons that we should seek to learn from history.
Even then he was highly controversial. One reason for that appeared then, and appears more clearly now, because he exercised his undoubted intelligence not only in doing his own work but also in trenchant and sometimes vituperative criticism of the work of others. That criticism was often embellished with words rarely seen and almost never understood (there is little doubt that Trevor-Roper's criticisms were quite devastating to those criticised in part because they were delivered with a combination of human superiority and a lack of delicacy which more fragile egos found difficult to accept). Trevor-Roper assumed that the behaviour that was accepted at the Oxford Union was equally acceptable in academic discourse in the late 20th century.
In part, Trevor-Roper's position was also affected by his, apparently deliberate, determination to attempt to be the leading "Annales" historian in the Anglophone world. The Annales school of historiography raised among many English-speaking historians, a kind of visceral distrust of French academia. While Febre and Bloch might be accepted as superb historians in their own right, subsequent leading French Annalistes, like Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie appeared to many stodgy Anglo-Saxons to have strayed far from history into a kind of multidisciplinary psychodrama centring on the almost indefinable concept of "mentalité".
From his pedastle as the English Annaliste, Trevor-Roper dispensed his desecating scorn on Whig, Tory, Marxist and Stubbsian alike, pillorying the rigid mental structures of one and the dull and dusty philology of others. It won him few friends.
But what of his work?
Trevor-Roper's books never had the power of a sustained synthesis and argument to match Bloch'sFeudal Society (let alone Braudel's Mediterranean World). However, his articles and papers were brilliant intellectual tours de force which managed to synthesise in fine Annaliste style several (and sometimes many) strands of enquiry enabling the reader to glance inside the perspective of the people of the time, and to understand the events of the time, their causes and effects at several levels at once with a real appreciation of the understandings of the then contemporary participant or observer.
One might suggest that Trevor-Roper was to history as D.H. Lawrence was to literature - the more space he provided for himself to develop his ideas, the less effective was the result. He was a master of the historical short story, but the space of the novel defeated his abilities. Perhaps he was a man with a brilliant and perceptive mind rather than one that could engage in long-term research leading to equally brilliant synthesis overr a broad canvasss in space and/or time.
This collection of his later essays on the period from the late 16th century to the early 18th demonstrates Trevor-Roper's talents at their best. The narrow subject and the limited space of each of the 15 articles allows him to draw together multiple strands and to provide a unique and enlightening synthesis which, even if wrong, has the enduring benefit of being itself human and treating the participants in history as humans.
It is an enriching experience, some 40 years or more after I first encountered Trevor-Roper's work and now that even the Hitler Diaries are forgotten (along with Lord Faker), to return and read the work that he left for us to consider. On the whole, it stands up well. Its strengths remain as strong as ever. Its weaknesses are less palpable because the personalities criticised by Trevor-Roper, who would have originally been offended, are, like the author, creatures of history. Whatever substance the criticisms had when made remains, but their caustic delivery is now jejune if not uncouth.
There are, of course, the kinds of weaknesses from which every historians suffers: the mastery that they have of their particular epoque tempts them to contrast that epoque with its predecessors and successors, in relation to which their knowledge is little better than that of the average educated reader. The supposed contrasts and differences are often in the nature of straw men. The arguments are those not with the author's own generation but generations past and not of academia but of the newspapers. It is one thing to provide an understanding of Archbishop Laud that is new and interesting and puts him in a new and different light. It is another thing to attempt to contrast Laud with the leaders of the mediaeval church or with John Wesley, where the picture of the mediaeval fathers or of Wesley is that of the writer's childhood and not that of current scholarship (especially by those who seek the same synthesis in their studies).
However, if you are interested in the period of what may be described as the "long" 17th-century, then it is worth spending the day or two required to read and reflect on this collection of essays. They may not convince you, but they will force you to consider whether you need to revisit your views of that time. Also keep a good dictionary beside you, Trevor-Roper loved showing off his vocabulary.
The final essay is itself now a historical document - in 1975 Trevor-Roper looked at the Act of Union in light of the then-emerging Scottish nationalist movement. To consider these observations in the light of the experience of Britain since that time, particularly the Scottish devolution that was provided by the Blair government, the Scottish independence referendum and its debates and result and the curious Brexit experience demonstrates how difficult it is to identify the lessons that we should seek to learn from history.
December 1, 2024
Just as the young orphans in OTwist swing and sway in dithyrambic hymn for their gruel, so too do I swing and sway in mind to “Hugh wonderful Hugh marvellous Hugh Glorious Hugh.” He defibrillates history in a way that no other can. He is cool and calm and mystic, and a scholar of strange and inalienable standing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews