Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh 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. According to John Philipps Kenyon, "some of short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books". Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman wrote that "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." Conversely, Sisman wrote: "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."
In 1945, British intelligence tasked Trevor-Roper with ascertaining the facts about Adolf Hitler's death. From interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents, he concluded in The Last Days of Hitler that Hitler was dead and had not escaped Berlin.
In 1983, Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries.
Early life and education
Trevor-Roper was born at Glanton, Northumberland, England, the son of Kathleen Elizabeth Davidson and Bertie William Edward Trevor-Roper, a doctor, descended from Henry Roper, 8th Baron Teynham and second husband of Anne, 16th Baroness Dacre. Trevor-Roper "enjoyed... that he was a collateral descendant of William Roper, the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Thomas More... as a boy he was aware that only a dozen lives separated him from inheriting the Teynham peerage."Trevor-Roper's brother, Patrick, became a leading eye surgeon and gay rights activist. Trevor-Roper was educated at Belhaven Hill School, Charterhouse, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read first Classics and then Modern History. He got a first-class degree in Classical Moderations in 1934 and won the Craven, the Ireland, and the Hertford scholarships in Classics. Initially, both he and his brother intended to make their careers in the Classics, but Hugh became bored with what he regarded as the pedantic technical aspects of the classics course at Oxford and switched to history, where he obtained first-class honours in 1936. Whilst at Oxford, he was a member of the exclusive Stubbs Society and was initiated as a Freemason in the Apollo University Lodge.
In 1937, he moved from Christ Church to Merton College, Oxford to become a research fellow. His first book was a 1940 biography of Archbishop William Laud, in which he challenged many of the prevailing perceptions surrounding Laud.
Military service and the Second World War
Trevor-Roper was a member of the University of Oxford's Officer Training Corps, reaching the rank of officer cadet corporal. On 28 February 1939, he was commissioned in the British Army as a second lieutenant with seniority in that rank from 1 October 1938, and attached to the cavalry unit of the Oxford University Contingent of the OTC. On 15 July 1940, he was promoted to war substantive lieutenant and transferred to the Intelligence Corps, Territorial Army.During the Second World War, he served as an officer in the Radio Security Service of the Secret Intelligence Service, and then on the interception of messages from the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. In early 1940, Trevor-Roper and E. W. B. Gill decrypted some of these intercepts, demonstrating the relevance of the material and spurring Bletchley Park efforts to decrypt the traffic. Intelligence from Abwehr traffic later played an important part in many operations including the Double-Cross System.
He formed a low opinion of most pre-war professional intelligence officers, but a higher one of some of the post-1939 recruits. In The Philby Affair Trevor-Roper argues that the Soviet spy Kim Philby was never in a position to undermine efforts by the chief of the Abwehr, German Military Intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, to overthrow the Nazi regime and negotiate with the British government.
Investigating Hitler's last days
In November 1945, Trevor-Roper was ordered by Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin, to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler's death, and to rebut the Soviet propaganda that Hitler was alive and living in the West. Using the alias of "Major Oughton", Trevor-Roper interviewed or prepared questions for several officials, high and low, who had been present in the Führerbunker with Hitler, and who had been able to escape to the West, including Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven. Although he cites eyewitness accounts of the burning of Hitler's body, Trevor-Roper notes that bones are understood to withstand burning.For the most part Trevor-Roper relied on investigations and interviews by hundreds of British, American and Canadian intelligence officers. He did not have access to Soviet materials. Working rapidly, Trevor-Roper drafted his report, which served as the basis for his most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler, in which he described the last ten days of Hitler's life and the fates of some of the higher-ranking members of the inner circle, as well as those of key lesser figures. Trevor-Roper transformed the evidence into a literary work, with sardonic humour and drama, and was much influenced by the prose styles of two of his favourite historians, Edward Gibbon and Lord Macaulay.
The book was cleared by British officials in 1946 for publication as soon as the war crimes trials ended. It was published in English in 1947; six English editions and many foreign language editions followed. According to American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Trevor-Roper received a letter from Lisbon written in Hebrew stating that the Stern Gang would assassinate him for The Last Days of Hitler, which, they believed, portrayed Hitler as a "demoniacal" figure but let ordinary Germans who followed Hitler off the hook, and that for this he deserved to die. Rosenbaum reports that Trevor-Roper told him this was the most extreme response he had ever received for one of his books.
Trevor-Roper also showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries. With numerous editions, the book was Trevor-Roper's most commercially successful.
Anti-communism
In June 1950, Trevor-Roper attended a conference in Berlin of anti-Communist intellectuals along with Sidney Hook, Melvin J. Lasky, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron and Franz Borkenau that resulted in the founding of the CIA front group Congress for Cultural Freedom and its magazine Encounter. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was a frequent contributor to Encounter, but had reservations about what he regarded as the over-didactic tone of some of its contributors, particularly Koestler and Borkenau.Historical debates and controversies
Trevor-Roper was famous for his lucid and acerbic writing style. In reviews and essays he could be pitilessly sarcastic, and devastating in his mockery. In attacking Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History, for instance, Trevor-Roper accused Toynbee of regarding himself as a Messiah complete with "the youthful Temptations; the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony".For Trevor-Roper, the major themes of early modern Europe were its intellectual vitality, and the quarrels between Protestant and Catholic states, the latter being outpaced by the former, economically and constitutionally. In Trevor-Roper's view, another theme of early modern Europe was expansion overseas in the form of colonies and intellectual expansion in the form of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In Trevor-Roper's view, the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries can ultimately be traced back to the conflict between the religious values of the Reformation and the rationalistic approach of what became the Enlightenment.
Trevor-Roper argued that history should be understood as an art, not a science and that the attribute of a successful historian was imagination. He viewed history as full of contingency, with the past neither a story of continuous advance nor of continuous decline but the consequence of choices made by individuals at the time. In his studies of early modern Europe, Trevor-Roper did not focus exclusively upon political history but sought to examine the interaction between the political, intellectual, social and religious trends.
His preferred medium of expression was the essay rather than the book. In his essays in social history, written during the 1950s and 1960s, Trevor-Roper was influenced by the work of the French Annales school, especially Fernand Braudel and did much to introduce the work of the Annales school to the English-speaking world. In the 1950s, Trevor-Roper wrote that Braudel and other Annalists were doing much innovative historical work but were "totally excluded from Oxford which remains, in historical matters, a retrograde provincial backwater".
English Civil War
In Trevor-Roper's opinion, the dispute between the Puritans and the Arminians was a major, although not the sole, cause of the English Civil War. For him, the dispute was over such issues as free will and predestination and the role of preaching versus the sacraments. Only later did the dispute become a matter of the structure of the Church of England. The Puritans desired a more decentralised and egalitarian church, with an emphasis on the laity, while the Arminians wished for an ordered church with a hierarchy, an emphasis on divine right and salvation through free will.As a historian of early modern Britain, Trevor-Roper was known for his disputes with fellow historians such as Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill, whose materialist, and in some measure "inevitablist", explanations of the English Civil War he attacked. Trevor-Roper was a leading player in the historiographical storm over the gentry, also known as the Gentry controversy, a dispute with the historians R. H. Tawney and Stone, about whether the English gentry were, economically, on the way down or up, in the century before the English Civil War and whether this helped cause that war.
Stone, Tawney and Hill argued that the gentry were rising economically and that this caused the Civil War. Trevor-Roper argued that while office-holders and lawyers were prospering, the lesser gentry were in decline. A third group of history men around J. H. Hexter and Geoffrey Elton, argued that the causes of the Civil War had nothing to do with the gentry. In 1948, a paper put forward by Stone in support of Tawney's thesis was vigorously attacked by Trevor-Roper, who showed that Stone had exaggerated the debt problems of the Tudor nobility. He also rejected Tawney's theories about the rising gentry and declining nobility, arguing that he was guilty of selective use of evidence and that he misunderstood the statistics.