A. L. Rowse


Alfred Leslie Rowse was a British historian and writer, best known for his work on Elizabethan England and books relating to Cornwall.
Born in Cornwall and raised in modest circumstances, he was encouraged to study for Oxford by fellow-Cornishman Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He was elected a fellow of All Souls College and later appointed lecturer at Merton College. Best known of his many works was The Elizabethan Age trilogy. His work on Shakespeare included a claim to have identified the Dark Lady of the Sonnets as Emilia Lanier, which attracted much interest from scholars, but also many counterclaims. Rowse was in popular demand as a lecturer in North America.
In the 1930s, he stood unsuccessfully as the Labour candidate for Penryn and Falmouth, though later in life he became a Conservative.

Life and politics

Rowse was born at Tregonissey, near St Austell, Cornwall, the son of Annie and Richard Rowse, a china clay worker. Despite his modest origins and his parents' limited education, he won a place at St Austell County Grammar School and then a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1921. He was encouraged in his pursuit of an academic career by a fellow Cornish man of letters, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, of Polperro, who recognised his ability from an early age. Rowse endured doubting comments about his paternity, thus he paid particular attention to his mother's association with a local farmer and butcher from Polgooth, near St Austell, Frederick William May. Any such frustrations were channelled into academia, which reaped him dividends later in life.
Rowse had planned to study English literature, having developed an early love of poetry, but was persuaded to read history. He was a popular undergraduate and made many friendships that lasted for life. He graduated with first class honours in 1925 and was elected a fellow of All Souls College the same year. In 1927 Rowse was appointed lecturer at Merton College, where he stayed until 1930. He then became a lecturer at the London School of Economics. In 1929, he proceeded to a Master of Arts degree. While at Oxford, Rowse met Adam von Trott zu Solz who was attending Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Rowse became deeply infatuated with Trott, a man whom he madly loved and who influenced his thinking about Germany. Trott took Rowse on a number of tours of Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden to introduce him to German high culture.
Rowse's biographer, Richard Ollard, described Trott as "...the most longest and most intense love" of Rowse's life, a man whom he was never able to get over despite a rift that had developed between them by the late 1930s. Rowse described Trott as "six feet tall" and "well aware of his shattering beauty", but complained that he was "fundamentally heterosexual". He later stated that his relationship with Trott was "an ideal love-affair, platonic in a philosophical sense; we never exchanged a kiss, let alone an embrace. We were both extremely high-minded, perhaps too much so".
In 1931, Rowse contested the parliamentary seat of Penryn and Falmouth for the Labour Party, but was unsuccessful, finishing third behind a Liberal. In the general election of 1935 he again stood unsuccessfully, but managed to finish in second place, ahead of the Liberal. In both the 1931 and 1935 elections, Maurice Petherick was returned as a Conservative MP to Parliament, albeit with a minority of the vote. Rowse supported calls made by Sir Stafford Cripps and others for a "Popular Front". Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party for his views. In 1937, Rowse wrote in his diary: "My emotional life was engulfed in Adam, quite anguished enough in itself". By this point, Rowse and Trott were drifting apart as Trott sought to make a diplomatic career in the highly elitist Auswärtiges Amt, which offended Rowse as serving in the Auswärtiges Amt meant serving the Nazis. Moreover, Trott was a German ultra-nationalist committed to recovering all of the lands lost under the Treaty of Versailles, which led him to a certain support for Nazi foreign policy, a position that Rowse could not accept. Trott's viewpoint that he did not particularly like the Nazis, but was willing to serve them insofar as Nazi foreign policy was aimed at undoing the Treaty of Versailles was dismissed by Rowse as amoral.
Rowse worked to get agreement by Labour and Liberal parties in Devon and Cornwall, making a common cause with the Liberal MP Sir Richard Acland. A general election was expected to take place in 1939, and Rowse, who was again Labour's candidate for Penryn & Falmouth, was not expected to have a Liberal opponent. That would increase his chances of winning. But, due to outbreak of war, the election did not take place and his political career was effectively ended.
Undeterred, Rowse chose to continue his career by seeking administrative positions at Oxford becoming Sub-Warden of All Souls College. In 1952, he failed in his candidacy for election as Warden against John Sparrow. Shortly afterwards he began what became regular trips to The Huntington Library in Southern California, where for many years he was a senior research fellow. He received a doctorate from Oxford University in 1953. After delivering the British Academy's 1957 Raleigh Lecture on history about Sir Richard Grenville's place in English history, Rowse was selected as a fellow of the academy in 1958.
Rowse published about 100 books. By the mid-20th century, he was a celebrated author and much-travelled lecturer, especially in the United States. He also published many popular articles in newspapers and magazines in Great Britain and the United States. His brilliance was widely recognised. His knack for the sensational, as well as his academic boldness, sustained his reputation. His opinions on rival popular historians, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and A. J. P. Taylor, were expressed sometimes in very strong terms.
In 1977, Rowse sparked much controversy with his book Homosexuals in History which linked creativity in the arts with being gay. Rowse wrote that his book was a study on the "predisposing conditions of creativeness, the psychological rewards of ambivalence, the doubled response to life, the sharping of perception, the tensions that led to achievement". Homosexuals in History attracted critical reviews as some of the artists identified as being gay in the book were based on only circumstantial evidence; the book had no footnotes or endnotes; his theory of a connection between artistic creativity and homosexuality was ill-defined; and his opinionated writing style full of arch comments alienated many. The American scholar Richard Aldrich wrote that for its flaws Homosexuals in History was one of the first serious studies in gay history and that many of the artists whom Rowse "outed" in his book were indeed gay, which marked the first time that this aspects of their lives was discussed in a mainstream book.
In his later years, Rowse moved increasingly towards the political right, and many considered him to be part of the Tory tradition by the time he died. One of Rowse's lifelong themes in his books and articles was his condemnation of the Conservative-dominated National Government's policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and the economic and political consequences for Great Britain of fighting a Second World War with Germany. He also criticised his former Labour Party colleagues–including George Lansbury, Kingsley Martin and Richard Crossman—for endorsing appeasement, writing "not one of the Left intellectuals could republish what they wrote in the Thirties without revealing what idiotic judgments they made about events." Another was his horror at the degradation of standards in modern society. He is reported as saying: "... this filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts".
Despite international academic success, Rowse remained proud of his Cornish roots. He retired from Oxford in 1973 to Trenarren House, his Cornish home, from where he remained active as writer, reviewer and conversationalist until immobilised by a stroke in 1996. He died at home on 3 October 1997. His ashes are buried in the Campdowns Cemetery, Charlestown near St Austell.

Elizabethan and Shakespearean scholarship

Rowse's early works focus on 16th-century England and his first full-length historical monograph, Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge, was a biography of a 16th-century sailor. His next was Tudor Cornwall, a lively detailed account of Cornish society in the 16th century. He consolidated his reputation with a one-volume general history of England, The Spirit of English History, but his most important work was the historical trilogy The Elizabethan Age: The England of Elizabeth, The Expansion of Elizabethan England, and The Elizabethan Renaissance, respectively examine the society, overseas exploration, and culture of late 16th-century England.
In 1963 Rowse began to concentrate on William Shakespeare, starting with a biography in which he claimed to have dated all the sonnets, identified Christopher Marlowe as the suitor's rival and solved all but one of the other problems posed by the sonnets. His failure to acknowledge his reliance upon the work of other scholars alienated some of his peers, but he won popular acclaim. In 1973 he published Shakespeare the Man, in which he claimed to have solved the final problem – the identity of the 'Dark Lady': from a close reading of the sonnets and the diaries of Simon Forman, he asserted that she must have been Emilia Lanier, whose poems he would later collect. He suggested that Shakespeare had been influenced by the feud between the Danvers and Long families in Wiltshire, when he wrote Romeo and Juliet. The Danverses were friends of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.
Rowse's "discoveries" about Shakespeare's sonnets amount to the following:
  1. The Fair Youth was the 19-year-old Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, extremely handsome and bisexual.
  2. The sonnets were written 1592–1594/5.
  3. The "rival poet" was Christopher Marlowe.
  4. The "Dark Lady" was Emilia Lanier. His use of the diaries of Simon Forman, which contained material about her, influenced other scholars.
  5. Christopher Marlowe's death is recorded in the sonnets.
  6. Shakespeare was a heterosexual man, who was faced with an unusual situation when the handsome, young, bisexual Earl of Southampton fell in love with him.
Rowse was dismissive of those who rejected his views. He supported his conclusions. In the case of Shakespeare's sexuality, he emphasised the playwright's heterosexual inclinations by noting that he had impregnated an older woman by the time he was 18, and was consequently obliged to marry her. Moreover, he fathered three children by the time he was 21. In the sonnets, Shakespeare's explicit erotic interest lies with the Dark Lady; he obsesses about her. Shakespeare was still married and Rowse believes he was having an extramarital affair.

Personal attitudes

The diary excerpts published in 2003 reveal that "he was an overt even rather proud homosexual in a pre-Wolfenden age, fascinated by young policemen and sailors, obsessively speculating on the sexual proclivities of everyone he meets". Much later, following retirement, he said, "of course, I used to be a homo; but now, when it doesn't matter, if anything I'm a hetero".
He was aware of his own intelligence from earliest childhood, and obsessed that others either did not accept this fact, or not quickly enough. The diaries describe what he said were "a series of often inane jealousies".
He described a "Slacker State": "I don't want to have my money scalped off me to maintain other people's children. I don't like other people; I particularly don't like their children; I deeply disapprove of their proliferation making the globe uninhabitable. The fucking idiots – I don't want to pay for their fucking."

Literary career

Rowse's first book was On History, a Study of Present Tendencies published in 1927 as the seventh volume of Kegan Paul's Psyche Miniature General Series. In 1931 he contributed to T. S. Eliot's quarterly review The Criterion. In 1935 he co-edited Charles Henderson's Essays in Cornish History for the Clarendon Press. His best-seller was his first volume of autobiography, A Cornish Childhood, first published by Jonathan Cape in 1942, which has gone on to sell nearly half a million copies worldwide. It describes his hard struggle to get to the University of Oxford and his love/hate relationship with Cornwall.
From the 1940s to the 1970s, he served as the General Editor for the popular "Teach Yourself History" and "Men and their Times" series, published by the English Universities Press.
Rowse wrote poetry all his life. He contributed poems to Public School Verse whilst at St Austell Grammar School. He also had verse published in Oxford 1923, Oxford 1924, and Oxford 1925. His collected poems A Life were published in 1981. The poetry is mainly autobiographical, descriptive of place and people he knew and cared for, e.g. The Progress of Love, which describes his platonic love for Adam von Trott, a handsome and aristocratic German youth who studied at Oxford in the 1930s and who was later executed for his part in the July Plot of 1944 to kill Hitler. Unusually for a British poet, Rowse wrote a great number of poems inspired by American scenery.
His most controversial book was on the subject of human sexuality: Homosexuals in History.

Biographer

He wrote other biographies of English historical and literary figures, and many other historical works. His biographies include studies of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and the Earl of Southampton, the major players in the sonnets, as well as later luminaries of English literature such as John Milton, Jonathan Swift and Matthew Arnold. A devoted cat-lover, he also wrote the biographies of several cats who came to live with him at Trenarren, claiming that it was as much a challenge to write the biography of a favourite cat as it was a Queen of England. He also published a number of short stories, mainly about Cornwall, of interest more for their thinly veiled autobiographical resonances than their literary merit. His last book, My View of Shakespeare, published in 1996, summed up his life-time's appreciation of The Bard of Stratford. The book was dedicated ''"To HRH The Prince of Wales in common devotion to William Shakespeare".''

Bibliophile

One of Rowse's great enthusiasms was collecting books, and he owned many first editions, many of them bearing his acerbic annotations. For example, his copy of the January 1924 edition of The Adelphi magazine edited by John Middleton Murry bears a pencilled note after Murry's poem In Memory of Katherine Mansfield: 'Sentimental gush on the part of JMM. And a bad poem. A.L.R.'
Upon his death in 1997 he bequeathed his book collection to the University of Exeter, and his personal archive of manuscripts, diaries, and correspondence. In 1998 the University Librarian selected about sixty books from Rowse's own working library and a complete set of his published books. The Royal Institution of Cornwall selected some of the remaining books and the rest were sold to dealers. The London booksellers Heywood Hill produced two catalogues of books from his library.

Honours

Rowse was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Literature.
In addition to his DLitt (Oxon) degree, Rowse received the honorary degrees of DLitt from the University of Exeter in 1960 and DCL from the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada, the same year.
In 1968 he was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow, taking the bardic name Lef A Gernow, reflecting his high standing in the Cornish community.
He was elected to the Athenaeum Club under Rule II in 1972, and received the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982.
Rowse was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in the 1997 New Year Honours.

Posthumous reputation

As well as his own appearances on radio and television, Rowse has been depicted in various TV drama documentaries about British politics in the 1930s and appeasement.
Christopher William Hill's radio play Accolades, rebroadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2007 as a tribute to its star, Ian Richardson, who had died the previous month, covers the period leading up to the publication of Shakespeare the Man in 1973 and publicity surrounding Rowse's unshakable confidence that he had discovered the identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. It was broadcast again on 9 July 2008.
A Cornish Childhood has also been adapted for voices by Judith Cook.

Selected works

On History: a Study of Present Tendencies, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1927Science and History: a New View of History, London: W. W. Norton, 1928Politics and the Younger Generation, London: Faber & Faber, 1931The Question of the House of Lords, London: Hogarth Press, 1934Queen Elizabeth and Her Subjects, London: Allen & Unwin, 1935Mr. Keynes and the Labour Movement, London: Macmillan, 1936Sir Richard Grenville of the "Revenge", London: Jonathan Cape, 1937What is Wrong with the Germans?, 1940Tudor Cornwall, London: Jonathan Cape, 1941A Cornish Childhood, London: Jonathan Cape, 1942The Spirit of English History, London: Jonathan Cape, 1943The English Spirit: Essays in History and Literature, London: Macmillan, 1944West-Country Stories, London: Macmillan, 1945The Use of History, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1946The End of an Epoch: Reflections on Contemporary History, London: Macmillan, 1947The England of Elizabeth: the Structure of Society. London: Macmillan, 1950The English Past: Evocation of Persons and Places, London: Macmillan, 1951An Elizabethan Garland, London: Macmillan, 1953The Expansion of Elizabethan England, London: Macmillan, 1955The Early Churchills, London: Macmillan, 1956The Later Churchills, London: Macmillan, 1958, London, Macmillan, 1959St Austell: Church, Town, Parish, St Austell: H. E. Warne, 1960All Souls and Appeasement: a Contribution to Contemporary History, London: Macmillan, 1961Ralegh and the Throckmortons, London: Macmillan, 1962William Shakespeare: a Biography, London: Macmillan, 1963Christopher Marlowe: a biography, London: Macmillan, 1964Shakespeare's Sonnets, London: Macmillan, 1964; A Cornishman at Oxford, London: Jonathan Cape, 1965Shakespeare's Southampton: Patron of Virginia, London: Macmillan, 1965Bosworth Field and the Wars of the Roses, London: Macmillan, 1966Cornish Stories, London: Macmillan, 1967A Cornish Anthology, London: Macmillan, 1968The Cornish in America, London: Macmillan, 1969The Elizabethan Renaissance: the Life of Society, London: Macmillan, 1971The Elizabethan Renaissance: the Cultural Achievement, London: Macmillan, 1972The Tower of London in the History of the Nation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972Shakespeare The Man, London: Macmillan, 1973Windsor Castle In the History of the Nation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974Victorian and Edwardian Cornwall from old photographs, London: Batsford, 1974 Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974Discoveries and Reviews: from Renaissance to Restoration, London: Macmillan, 1975Oxford: In the History of the Nation, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975Jonathan Swift: Major Prophet, London, Thames & Hudson, 1975A Cornishman Abroad, London: Jonathan Cape, 1976Matthew Arnold: Poet and Prophet, London: Thames & Hudson, 1976Homosexuals in History, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977Shakespeare the Elizabethan, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977Milton the Puritan: Portrait of a Mind, London: Macmillan, 1977The Byrons and the Trevanions, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978A Man of the Thirties, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979Memories of Men and Women, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980A Man of Singular Virtue: being a Life of Sir Thomas More by his Son-in-Law William Roper, and a Selection of More's Letters, London: Folio Society, 1980 Shakespeare's Globe: his Intellectual and Moral Outlook, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981A Life: Collected Poems, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1981Eminent Elizabethans, London: Macmillan, 1983Night at the Carn and Other Stories, London: William Kimber, 1984Shakespeare's Characters: a Complete Guide, London: Methuen, 1984Glimpses of the Great, London: Methuen, 1985The Little Land of Cornwall, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986A Quartet of Cornish Cats, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986Stories From Trenarren, London: William Kimber, 1986Reflections on the Puritan Revolution, London: Methuen, 1986The Poet Auden: a Personal Memoir, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987; Court and Country: Studies in Tudor Social History, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987Froude the Historian: Victorian Man of Letters, Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987Quiller-Couch: a Portrait of "Q", London: Methuen, 1988A. L. Rowse's Cornwall: a Journey through Cornwall's Past and Present, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988Friends and Contemporaries, London: Methuen, 1989The Controversial Colensos, Redruth: Dyllansow Truran, 1989Discovering Shakespeare: a Chapter in Literary History, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989Four Caroline Portraits, London: Duckworth, 1993All Souls in My Time, London: Duckworth, 1993The Regicides and the Puritan Revolution, London: Duckworth, 1994Historians I Have Known, London: Duckworth, 1995My View of Shakespeare, London: Duckworth, 1996Cornish Place Rhymes, Tiverton: Cornwall Books, 1997 The Elizabethan Age, London: Folio Society, 2012

Biography and bibliography

  • Capstick, Tony, A. L. Rowse: An Illustrated Bibliography, Wokingham: Hare's Ear Publication
  • Cauveren, Sydney, , Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press
  • Cauveren, Sydney, "A. L. Rowse: Historian and Friend", Contemporary Review, December 2001, pp. 340–346
  • Jacob, Valerie, Tregonissey to Trenarren: A. L. Rowse – The Cornish Years, St. Austell: Valerie Jacob
  • Ollard, Richard, The Diaries of A. L. Rowse, London: Allen Lane
  • Whetter, James, Dr. A. L. Rowse: Poet, Historian, Lover of Cornwall, Gorran, St. Austell: Lyfrow Trelyspen
  • Payton, Philip, A. L. Rowse and Cornwall, Exeter: University of Exeter Press
  • Donald Adamson is due to publish a biography of A. L. Rowse, see .
  • Slattery-Christy, David, . New play exploring the relationship between A.L. Rowse and Adam von Trott during the 1930s in Oxford. Published by Christyplays. www.christyplays.com