Historian of large vision scorned
John Plumb
FOR VERONICA WEDGWOOD THESE: STUDIES IN SEVENTEENTH- CENTURY HISTORY edited by Richard and Pamela Tudor-Craig
Collins, fI5
This festscrift is both timely and rather sad. Dame Veronica was rightly showered with honours in the Sixties; since then her reputation and her output have suffered a slow decline. Her only major work for decades has been an attempt at world history, The Spoils of Time, published in 1984 — a good, if puzzling, book. True, there have been elegant lectures, short excursions into the relationship between literature and history but it would not be unfair to say that her major work was over by 1959 and that there has been nothing comparable to the magisterial work which she produced before she was 50. And that is our loss, and partly, I suspect, the fault of the historical profession. Her distinction was very grudgingly recognised by the British Academy when one gritty-minded Oxford professional female historian opposed her election on the grounds that she wrote too well; she dismissed her work as 'all style'. Partly this animus was due to envy of Dame Veronica's public success and the shower of honours which de- scended on her head but it also partly sprang from a deepening belief that there was a 'professional history' which could only be written by specially trained academic historians, a history that was infinitely superior to 'general history' which was concerned with events, people, and with the unfolding story of nations or with depicting the great cultural, intellec- tual and political upheavals — the Renaiss- ance, the Thirty Years' War, the French Revolution etc.
General history on the grand scale has been scorned by the intellectual fashion makers, although, given the prospect of making a penny or two, few professional historians who have the talent for it will refuse to write it (vide Sir Geoffrey Elton). Certainly the intellectual climate of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties has been a cruel one for sensitive historians of large vision, and especially those committed to the view that historical writing is as essen- tial a part of a national culture as painting, music, literature. The post-war years, like the Thirties, were more friendly, friendly enough for Dame Veronica's gifts to flour- ish and display themselves, and she pro- duced her great works — The Thirty Years' War, The King's Peace, The King's War, and a final short coda The Trial of Charles 1. These books, of course, are read by thousands of non-historians and a few score professionals of broad vision, several of whom have contributed to this hand- some volume, edited by Richard and Pamela Tudor-Craig. Their own contributions are excellent. Richard 011ard who is writing a life of Clarendon describes Hyde's second mar- riage to Frances Aylesbury — a marriage that has been misdated with curious reg- ularity — by Clarendon himself, by his first biographer and even by Sir Charles Firth (he got it right once, only to get it wrong again) — a nice little grain of professional historiography here — but 011ard uses this occasion to discuss Clarendon's nature and his affections as a son, a husband and a father, showing a wisdom about the human heart that Clarendon himself would have admired. Pamela Tudor-Craig writes naturally enough about Charles I and Little Gidding, a numinous place to which she has devoted her life, and if her scholarship tends to be a little optimistic, the essay is both wise and moving. The other essays are, as they should be in a volume honouring Dame Veronica, very readable and concerned, in the main, with people and events. J.H. Baxter and A.L. Rowse, two veteran historians, are in excellent form; Christopher Hill, alas, pro- duces almost a parody of his own metho- dology; but Oliver Millar writes at his very best about Van Dyk and Stafford. There is no slouch amongst the lot. Skip the bib- liography, for that is the saddest part, or read the dates carefully and brood on them and see the sad decline of British culture. Since the 1960s and 1970s pygmies every- where, worse than in the 1750s, not even a Samuel Johnson in sight, and certainly not a David Hume.
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