Gibbon at Sheffield Place
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Edward Gibbon died in London on 16 January, 1794, unexpectedly, after a minor operation, aged 56. His remains, physical and literary, were taken over by his closest friend, now his executor, Lord Sheffield. The body disappeared into Sheffield's family mausoleum in the parish church of Fletching, Sussex, next to Sheffield's grand house, Sheffield Place, and the manuscripts into Sheffield's family archives. Gibbon's great library at Lausanne would have gone there too if Sheffield had had his way. He had wanted to shelve it there as Bibliotheca Gibboniana, a permanent monument to Gibbon and his friendship with Gibbon. But Gibbon had demurred. He was 'a friend to the circulation of property of every kind', he wrote, and he wanted his library to be dispersed, as it had been assembled, through the sale-room, for the use of scholars, not pickled in a country house. In fact that did not happen. The library was put up for sale, but bought as a whole by William Beckford, not for love of Gibbon (whom he hated) but so that 'I might have something to read when passing through Lausanne'.
Last Sunday there was a bicentenary cel- ebration of Gibbon in Fletching church, including 'a thanksgiving service for histori- ans'. That would surely have pleased Gibbon. Not many clergy gave thanks to God for him in his time. To most of them he was an 'infidel', an 'unbeliever', an athe- ist. In fact he was not: he was a deist and explicitly rejected the 'infidelity' — i.e. the atheist materialism — of the avant garde French philosophers. However, the ortho- dox were impatient of such fine distinc- tions, and protest was vain. So Gibbon, having annihilated his clerical critics with the devastating fusillade of his Vindication, absolutely refused further controversy. The
only occasion on which he betrayed real irritation was when the radical unitarian chemist, Joseph Priestley, tried to force him back into the arena by applying to him `the invidious name of unbeliever'.
It had all begun, of course, with those two famous (or notorious) chapters 15 and 16 at the end of the first volume of the Decline and Fall. Gibbon knew well enough that there might be trouble, but he fancied that he had re-insured himself by his care- ful language. Had he not admitted that 'the first cause' of the triumph of Christianity was its truth? Surely then 'an age of light and liberty would receive without scandal' an enquiry into the 'secondary', 'human' causes which Divine Providence had con- descended to use for its purpose. Had he foreseen all the fuss, he afterwards wrote, he might have 'softened' those 'two invidi- ous chapters'. Indeed, we now know, he had at one time contemplated scrapping them altogether, but had been stiffened by Sheffield. Good for Sheffield!
What a lot Gibbon owed to Sheffield! In general, Sheffield seems a shadowy figure: a patriotic public man, a great 'improver', resolute in defence of British interests, of commerce, of law and order. But his claim to remembrance is as the friend of Gibbon. And what a good friend! They had met in 1763 when they found themselves staying at the same fashionable pension in Lausanne. Gibbon was then preparing to set out on his famous Grand Tour of Italy, and he would have liked Sheffield, then plain Cap- tain Holroyd of the Royal Foresters, to accompany him; but that proved impossible and instead he went with another young man from the same pension, William 'Fancy a spot of ram-raiding?' Guise. Afterwards all three would meet again in Parliament. Sheffield took infinite trouble for Gibbon: managed his finances, acted as his agent, disposed of his encum- bered property, and when Gibbon emigrat- ed to Lausanne, organised the transport of his library and his cellar. It was to Sheffield that most of Gibbon's letters were written, in Sheffield Place that the last volumes of his great work were prepared for publica- tion, and it was Sheffield who, after his death, edited and published his Miscella- neous Works, imposing unity and form on the six incomplete drafts of his Memoirs.
That, of course, led to further trouble, for the Memoirs contained Gibbon's famous portrait of Oxford university in his time: the silent, invisible professors and the 'dull and deep potations' of the high-tory, not to say Jacobite, Fellows of his college. Once again the injured parties found a worthy champion. A loyal Magdalen man, James Hurdis, beneficed in Sussex, not so far from Sheffield Place, used his private press to print another Vindication, in which, as his biographer admits, 'while heaping plenty of abuse on Gibbon, he is obliged to acknowledge the truth of most of his strictures'. I am glad to say that Mag- dalen College has now forgiven Gibbon: there have been bicentenary celebrations there too. It has taken time: in 1940 Geoffrey Keynes found some members of that college who still regarded him as 'an unprofitable undergraduate'.
After publishing th'b Miscellaneous Works, Sheffield locked up the Gibbon papers. From the friend of Gibbon living, he had now become the high priest of Gib- bon dead, and profane eyes were not to see what he had not chosen to show them. He alone, he maintained, really knew Gibbon and could interpret him to the laity. I am not sure that Gibbon would have approved such an argument. Sheffield (who lived to be 86) even instructed his son and heir to continue the ban. It was continued till 1896 — just after the Gibbon centenary — when the third and last Lord Sheffield sold the papers to the British Museum and the real Gibbon industry began. Scholars then set to work and re-disintegrated Sheffield's text of the Memoirs into their six drafts and thereby showed, incidentally, how well Sheffield had done his work of integration. He had taken some liberties, allowable at the time, but his is still the most accessible and readable text.
No doubt there will be other celebrations of Gibbon this year. There is to be another in Oxford in June. Oxford is very good at covering up its errors and re-claiming (in time) its 'unprofitable undergraduates'. But really there are only two places which can justly and honourably and proudly claim him. One is Lausanne, which rescued him from Oxford and transformed his mind where, in his own phrase, the statue was found in the block of marble' — and to which he returned to complete his great work. The other is Sheffield Place.
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