Hugh Trevor-Roper and the Monks of Magdalen
PAUL JOHNSON
Hugh Trevor-Roper was the unofficial but undisputed head of the histoly profession in England. I admired his wide learning and literary ability greatly. but always saw him as a comic figure, his abrasive, contemptuous and ultra-critical front concealing cavernous uncertainties and a profound fear of making an ass of himself. Having written his respectable Archbishop Laud (1940) and his rattling bestseller, The Last Days of Hitler (1947), he became scared of exposing himself to attack and his writing career threatened to come to a stop. His wife Zandra, Haig's daughter and almost as spiky as her husband, told me, 'Oh, our attic is full of Hugh's abandoned manuscripts — trunks of them. Plenty of chapter ones but no chapter twos.' Gradually, however, he honed his taste for the long historical essay into an art form, and his collections of them. plus one or two extended monographs, constituted a reasonable output. though he never wrote the big book which (one assumes) was in him. But then, neither did Acton.
During his wartime service in MI5 and MI6 he had acquired what Pierre MendesFrance called (apropos Francois Mitterrand) he goat du policier. He loved mysteries, plots and the arcana of life. He would go around opening closet doors in the hope of discovering skeletons, and, finding nothing but mops and buckets, would suspect the charlady of conspiracy. He assumed that everyone had the same kind of cabalistic mind as his own, and a similar appetite for byzantine dealings. This made him paranoid at times, which, in turn, led him to engage in elaborate plotting to annihilate his enemies, real or imaginary. I discovered these propensities for myself when I came up to Magdalen as an undergraduate in 1946, the same year he became a student (fellow) of Christ Church. He hated Magdalen, first because it was the base of A.J.P. Taylor, whose wartime The Course of German History was as widely read as his own Last Days. Moreover, Taylor capped Roper in 1948 by becoming the star performer at the notorious Wroclau Conference of Intellectuals, where he put the massed ranks of communists and fellow-travellers to ignominious flight. But Roper hated my other Magdalen tutor, Bruce McFarlane, even more, partly because he suspected, rightly, that Bruce was a better scholar, but also because he had made the college a formidable centre of mediaeval history, which Roper despised, producing such future magnificos as Professor Karl Leyser, Dr Gerald Harriss and the terrifying J.P. Cooper. Roper, who was violently anti-Catholic in those days. suspected Magdalen historians, whom he called 'Monks', of Romish tendencies. He particularly deplored what he called our 'capture' of the Stubbs Society.
The Stubbs Society was a brilliant affair in those days; in theory an undergraduate club for the reading of history papers, in practice dominated by senior dons who brought distinguished guests to engage in learned debate. I considered myself lucky to be a member at all, and truly a favourite of the gods to be elected, in due course, treasurer. Roper knew that I was not just a suspect but an avowed Jesuit-educated papist and decided it was time for a coup. That term, in 1948, I was due to be elected secretary at the final meeting. As treasurer, I had noted that a suspicious number of extra subscriptions had been taken out in the previous fortnight but, not being a conspiracy theorist, had thought no more of it. However, when I and Karl Leyser arrived for the meeting, we found it packed with strangers, chiefly red-faced Christ Church louts, who looked as though they would have been more at home at a bump-supper or a Bullingdon Club grind. Roper, who was now Censor of Christ Church, had hustled them all together to vote us out of office. as indeed they did. It was the kind of plot the CP had perfected in the British trades-union movement. and Roper had clearly studied the party's methods. His delight at the success of his scheme was so transparent and schoolboyish that I had to laugh. though the rest of the Monks were very annoyed.
Nearly 20 years later, this episode, which I had completely forgotten, had a comic sequel. In 1964 Roper had foolishly agreed to give a series of lectures on mediaeval history at one of the new naff universities;
Sussex, I think. Still more foolishly, he published them the following year under the title The Rise of Christian Europe. Shortly after, Hugh Roper came up to me at lunch in the Beefsteak Club, his face contorted with fury (unusual for him, as he sought always to conceal his feelings) and said, 'So you waited 20 years for your revenge, and now you have it.' I was mystified, and asked him to explain. He answered, 'Don't pretend. I hate hypocrisy. Why don't you admit openly that you have never forgiven me for that Stubbs Society business, and now you have published that review. I haven't read it, needless to say, but my advisers [a typical Roper phrase] tell me it is vile,' He then swept off. Light dawned. I was then editor of the New Statesman. Quite unknown to me, the literary editor, Karl Miller, had sent Roper's book to, of all people, Bruce McFarlane, to review. The first I had seen of it was when I read the page proofs as I was putting the paper to press. It seemed to me not only fair but also generous, comparing Roper to Macaulay as a historical essayist, but making a few sly digs to indicate, quite accurately, that Roper's grasp of mediaeval history was far from comprehensive. They were quite enough to arouse Roper's paranoid conspiracy antennae. He dismissed my explanation as humbug, and for a time refused to speak to me.
Indeed, it was not until he was hustled into the Hitler diaries mess by the Murdoch press that we got on terms again. I thought that he had had a raw deal, and that the universal jeers from his professional colleagues did indeed smack of revenge for past slights or targets for his ferocious wit. I commiserated gently with him and told him not to take it too hard. He said sadly, 'One small advantage of such a catastrophe is that it shows you who your true friends are. And you find there are very few of them.' Thereafter we were chums and had some good chuckles together. But he slowly became a sad, rather than a comic, figure: lost without his wife, his declining eyesight, never good. making it increasingly difficult for him to read or even write, a bewildered spirit from the past in a philistine and barbarous world. Without the House of Lords, full of similar grandees crippled by age and time, he would have been desolate indeed. Now he is with Gibbon, his favourite, who first coined the phrase 'the Monks of Magdalen'. RIP.
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