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Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton

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Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (January 15, 1914 – January 26, 2003) was a notable historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany.

Contents

Life

He was born in Glanton, Northumberland, and educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford in the Classics and Modern History. Initially Trevor-Roper intended to make his career in the Classics, but he became bored with aspects of Philology, and instead switched to History. Trevor-Roper's first book was his 1940 biography of Archbishop William Laud, in which Trevor-Roper challenged many of the prevailing perceptions surrounding Laud.

During World War Two, Trevor-Roper served as a Military Intelligence officer. Later, after the war, Trevor-Roper made the claim that one of his close colleagues whom he knew and liked during the war, Kim Philby had successfully undermined efforts by the Chief of the German Abwehr Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to overthrow the Nazi regime and negotiate with the British government. Later in 1963, when Philby was discovered to be an Soviet agent, Trevor-Roper felt an deep sense of betrayal by his former friend.

In 1945, Trevor-Roper was ordered by the British government to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler's death and to rebut the claims of the Soviet government that Hitler was still alive and living somewhere in the West. The ensuing investigation resulted in Trevor-Roper's most famous book, 1947's The Last Days of Hitler, in which Trevor-Roper traced the last ten days of the Fuehrer's life.

In 1950, Trevor-Roper attended an conference in Berlin of anti-Communist intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron and Franz Borkenau that resulted in the founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazine Encounter. In the 1950s and 1960s Trevor-Roper served as an frequent contributor to Encounter, but in private was sometimes bothered by what he regarded as the overtly didactic tone of Encounter. 

In 1957 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, a post he held until 1980; subsequently he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge.  Having achieved his first major success with The Last Days of Hitler (1947), he consolidated his reputation as an authority on the Third Reich with books such as Hitler's Table Talk (1953) and The Goebbels Diaries (1978), although his area of specialty was early modern Britain, especially the period around the English Civil War.


As a historian of early modern Britain, Trevor-Roper was most famous for his disputes with fellow historians such as Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill, whose materialist explanations of the English Civil War he enthusiastically attacked. Trevor-Roper was a leading player over the so-called "storm over the gentry" (also known as the "gentry controversy"), a fiery dispute with Christian Socialist R. H. Tawney and Stone over whether the English gentry were in economic decline or were in economic advancement in the century before the English Civil War and, regardless of whether the gentry were rising or not, did this have anything to do with the outbreak of war in 1642. Stone, Tawney and Hill all argued that the gentry were in economic advancement and this caused the Civil War while Trevor-Roper argued that the genry were in decline and that was the Civil War's cause. An third faction centered around J. H. Hexter and Geoffrey Elton who argued that the causes of the Civil War had nothing to either the alleged rise or decline of the gentry. 


His attacks on the philosophies of history advanced by the historians Arnold J. Toynbee and Edward Hallett Carr, and on his colleague A.J.P. Taylor's account of the origins of World War II, also won Trevor-Roper wide recognition. Another notable dispute was with Taylor and Alan Bullock over the question of whatever Adolf Hitler had any beliefs or not. In the 1950s, Trevor-Roper was ferocious in his criticism of Bullock for his portrayal of Hitler as an “mountebank” (i.e. opportunistic adventurer) instead of the ideologue Trevor-Roper believed Hitler to be. When Taylor offered an picture of Hitler similar to Bullock's in his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War, the same debate continued between Taylor and Trevor-Roper. Trevor-Roper frequently published articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines directed to the general public (some of which were collected in his book Historical Essays in 1957), and appeared occasionally on television.


In regards to the Globalist-Continentalist debate between those who argued that Adolf Hitler had as his aim the conquest of the entire world vs those who argued that Hitler sought only the conquest of the continent of Europe, Trevor-Roper was one of the leading Continentalists. Trevor-Roper argued that the Globalist case rested upon taking an wide scattering of Hitler's remarks over several decades and attempting to turn these views into an systematic ideology. In Trevor-Roper's view, the only consistent objective Hitler sought was the domination of Europe. 


A notable thesis propagated by Trevor-Roper was the “general crisis of the 17th century” thesis. According to Trevor-Roper, the middle years of the 17th century in Western Europe saw a widespread break-down in politics, economics, and society caused by an complex series of demographic, economic and political problems. Thus in Trevor-Roper’s “general crisis” thesis various events such as the English Civil War, the Fronde in France, the climax of the Thirty Years War in Germany, and revolts against the Spanish Crown in Portugal, Naples and Catalonia were all manifestations of the same problem. The most important causal agents behind the “general crisis” was in Trevor-Roper’s opinion the conflict between “Court” and “Country”; that is behind the newly emerging (or would be newly emerging in the case of the Holy Roman Empire) centralizing, bureaucratic sovereign nation-state on one hand and behind the traditional, regional-centered, land-based aristocracy and gentry in the countryside on the other hand. The “general crisis” thesis generated much controversy between on one hand those such as the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm who believed in the “general crisis” thesis, but saw the problems of 17th century Europe as being more social and economic in origin then Trevor-Roper would allow and between those who denied there was any “general crisis” in the first place.    


One of Trevor-Roper's most successful books was his 1976 biography of the Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse who long been regarded as one of the world's leading experts on China. In his biography, Trevor-Roper procceeded to expose Backhouse's life-story and virtually all of his scholarship as a fraud. The discrediting of Backhouse as a source led to much of China's history being re-written in the West as many of Backhouse's assertions such as his claim that the Dowager Empress ordered the murder of her son were proven to be false. 


On October 4, 1954, Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston (March 9, 1907 - August 15, 1997), eldest daughter of Field Marshal the Earl Haig by his wife, the former Hon. Dorothy Maud Vivian. Lady Alexandra was a goddaughter of Queen Alexandra, and had previously been married to Rear-Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston, by whom she had had three children.  His brother, Patrick Trevor-Roper, was a leading eye surgeon and prominent gay rights campaigner.


He was awarded a life peerage in 1979, and chose the title "Baron Dacre of Glanton".


At the age of sixty-seven, he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His election to this position, which surprised his contemporaries, was engineered by a group of fellows led by Maurice Cowling, then the leading Peterhouse Historian. Despite this, his relations with the fellowship (and indeed the porters) of Peterhouse subsequently proved to be confrontational.


The nadir of his career came in 1983, when, along with others, he authenticated the so-called Hitler Diaries, which later forensic examination proved to be a fake. The other experts asked to examine the diaries were Eberhard Jäckel and Gerhard Weinberg. 


Trevor-Roper's endorsement of the alleged Hitler diaries raised questions in the public mind not only about his perspicacity as a historian but also about his personal integrity, because The Sunday Times, a newspaper to which he regularly contributed book reviews and in whose parent company he held a financial interest, had already paid a considerable sum for the right to serialise the diaries. Lord Dacre denied any dishonest motivation, insisting that he, like others, had made a genuine mistake.  It was after this mistake that Private Eye nicknamed Trevor-Roper as Hugh Very-Ropey.  Despite the shadow that this incident cast over his later career, he continued writing (producing Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans in 1987, for example), and his work continued to be well received.


Lord Dacre of Glanton died of cancer in a hospice in Oxford, aged 89.



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