The Professor and the Parson – A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking, by Adam Sisman
The Professor and the Parson – A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking
By Adam Sisman Profile Books £12.99
The funeral of Hugh Trevor-roper at Christ Church in 2003, attended by seven duchesses, was also the funeral of an old Oxford.
He himself survives in print under his real name, but he died as Lord Dacre of Glanton, took that sort of thing seriously, and cut a figure in London clubland. The Last Days of Hitler (1947) is deservedly still in print; as an officer in intelligence, he had been commissioned to inspect the bunker, interrogated the witnesses, and wrote a classic, on the level of that great German film, Downfall. Having treated Hitler as a Gibbonian grotesque, he ever after counted as a German expert, consulted by Margaret Thatcher as to unification.
But there is a hole in the middle of this picture. What he really knew about was the 17th century. A publisher of genius, Richard Ollard, in the 1960s, commissioned The Fontana History of Europe, paperbacks on 50-year periods, and gave Trevor-roper the Thirty Years’ War. He had his own 30 years’ war with it, and eventually handed the job (very well-done) to Geoffrey Parker. The other non-book was on the English Civil War.
Both of these subjects are so essential to an understanding of world history that you hardly know where to begin.
The Thirty Years’ War created the sovereign state and international law, and the English Civil War created Great Britain, parliamentary government, America and all that. Trevor-roper was enormously well-qualified to write about these things – so why did nothing, apart from essays, appear? The answer has to be the writer’s old friend, displacement activity.
Adam Sisman’s splendid and intriguing book is a case in point. Trevor-roper always had a tendency to waste time, no doubt from doubts about what he should say about his very grand subjects.
Was he on the Protestant side, or the Catholic? The answer was Anglicanism, but there too he had problems. I remember him saying that you should go through the paces without actually believing. That probably lamed him when it came to the historical gallop, of which he was otherwise so capable.
Any diversion was welcome and they were legion: from becoming a ballistics expert over Kennedy’s assassination to authenticating the preposterous Hitler diaries.
The Professor and the Parson is a fascinating account of another by-way: Trevor-roper’s dealings with a smalltime crook, who remorselessly exploited (there is not much, beyond respectability, to exploit) both academe and the Church of England.
Late in 1958, Regius Professor Trevor-roper had a letter from a landlady saying that a married couple, called Peters, was being persecuted by the Bishop of Oxford. He agreed to see Peters, who complained that he was being prevented from officiating at a bells-and-smells church, and that the bishop would probably supervene with his college, Magdalen, where he had gained a First in History.
Peters presented excellent references, from impeccable referees. All of this in pursuit of a postgraduate degree, called a B.litt which Oxford then preferred to the PHD – a German-american torture which entailed knowing more and more about less and less.