Historical Essays

305 Pages·25.017 MB·English

by  Hugh Trevor-Roper

HISTORICAL
ESSAYS
BY
H. R. TREVOR-ROPER
LONDON
MACMILLAN & CO LTD
1963
By 1th e same author
*
ARCHBISHLOAPU D1,5 73-1645
THEL ASTD AYSO FH ITLER
Copyright <0 by H R Trevor-Roper 1957
Fznt E.aztzon October 1957
Reprinted December 1957, 1958, 1963
MACMILLAANN D COMPANLYI MITED
St .i\.fartzn's Street London WC2
afro Bombay Calcutta ,Madra, Afelbourne
THEM ACMILLACNO MPANOYF CANADIA. IMDI TE
Toronto
l'RlNTl!:D IN Gil.EAT BRITAIN
FOREWORD
O
ught one to reprint historical essays which have al­
ready been published once? This is a question which
faces any historian who happens to have written such
occasional essays. They may look well enough in their place, in
the weekly or monthly press, but when they reappear, strung
together, they often wear a miscellaneous look, as if they formed
not a book but a scrap-heap. Since I am aware of this fact, and
since these essays, ranging unevenly over so many centuries,
may seem to invite such criticism, perhaps I should introduce
them with an apologia. I should state why I have been so bold
as to republish essays which have already appeared in well­
known periodicals, and particularly in that distressingly radical
organ, for whose space however I am most grateful, The .New
Statesman and Nation.1
My answer to this question is simple, perhaps presumptuous.
Essays like these, various in time, depth and subject, can only
bear republication if they receive an underlying unity from the
philosophy of the writer: a philosophy, I would add, which is
best illustrated by their very variety. Such a philosophy may be
criticised as a bad or questionable philosophy, but if it is dis­
cernible through all these essays and gives them consistency,
that is enough for my purpose. It will ensure that this volume is
not a scrap-heap but a book.
It is perhaps anachronistic to write of a historian's philo­
sophy. Today most professional historians 'specialise'. They
choose a period, sometimes a very brief period, and within that
period they strive, in desperate competition with ever-expand­
ing evidence, to know all the facts. Thus armed, they can
comfortably shoot down any amateurs who blunder or rivals
who stray into their heavily fortified field; and, of course,
knowing the strength of modern defensive weapons, they them-
1 Of the essays reprinted m this book No. 7 first appeared in EncounNots.er 2,0,
27, 29 and 31 in History TNoo. d2a3 yin, C ommentNao. ry30, m ThR SpecNtoa. tor,
39m The'·rL11mtcesS1 uapry/ JlNeom. .42e inn tP.r obleCmo,m·. mofu nAmll nt h<' r<',t
app<'ainr Tth•ed .N'SftWa twnan.
Vl FOREWORD
selves keep prudently within their own frontiers. Theirs is a
static world. They have a self-contained economy, a Maginot
Line, and large reserves which they seldom use; but they have
no philosophy. For a historical philosophy is incompatible with
such narrow frontiers. It must apply to humanity in any period.
To test it, a historian must dare to travel abroad, even in
hostile country; to express it he must be ready to write essays
even on subjects on which he may be ill-qualified to write
books. This was a truism to the great historians of the past: who
would ever ask what was Gibbon's period? Today it is a heresy:
with few exceptions, we do not even enquire after the philosophy
of our masters.
If these essays are united by any such philosophy, the reader
will discover it. He will also discover any special interests or
eccentricities of which I may be guilty. Here I will only say that
to me the interest of history lies not in its periods but in its
problems, and, primarily, in one general problem which is its
substance in all times and all places: the interplay between
heavy social forces or intractable geographical facts and the
creative or disruptive forces which wrestle with them: the
nimble mind, the burning conscience, the blind passions of man.
For history, I believe, is not static, a mere field to be mapped
out. It is not predictable, nor yet aimless. It is an endless play
of forces, all determinable, except one: and that one is the
dynamic element, the human mind which sometimes triumphs,
sometimes destroys, sometimes founders. If these essays, random
samples from a great ocean, nevertheless illuminate different
aspects of that central problem, I can collect and republish
them with a clear conscience.
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER
CHRIST CHURCH
OXFORD
CONTENTS
cilAPTElt PAGE
I. THE HOLY LAND I
II. 6
THE WORLD OF HOMER
III. THE DARK AGES I2
IV. THE MEDIEVAL ITALIAN CAPITALISTS 18
V. IBN KHALDOUN AND THE DECLINE OF BARBARY 24
VI. UP AND DowN IN THE CouNTRY: THE PAsToN
LETTERS 30
VII.
DESIDERIUS ERASMUS 35
VIII. NrccoLo MACHIAVELLI 61
IX. THE TWILIGHT OF THE MONKS 67
X. ENGLAND'S MODERNISER: THOMAS CROMWELL 74
XI. THE CRISIS OF ENGLISH HUMANISM: REGINALD
POLE AND HIS CIRCLE 79
XII. HUGH LATIMER AND THE ENGLISH COMMON­
WEALTH
XIII. SrR THOMAS MoRE AND THE ENGLISH LAY
RECUSANTS 91
XIV. ELIZABETH AND CECIL 98
XV. THE LAST ELIZABETHAN: SrR WALTER RALEIGH 103
XVI. THE JESUIT MISSION IN ENGLAND AND THE
GUNPOWDER PLOT I08
XVII. TWICE MARTYRED: THE ENGLISH JESUITS AND
3
THEIR HISTORIANS I I
XVIII. THE JESUITS IN JAPAN I 19
XIX. FULLER'S 'WORTHIES' AND THE AGE OF ENGLISH
CHARITY 125
'.XX. JAMES I AND HIS BISHOPS I 30
vii
Vlll CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
XXI. 46
THE JEWISH DISPERSION I
XXII. r 5 r
THE SEPHARDIM IN ENGLAND
XXIII.
THE JEWS AND MODERN CAPITALISM 156
XXIV. r6r
RuBENS IN POLITICS
XXV.
GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS AND THE SWEDISH
167
EMPIRE
XXVI.
A CASE OF Co-ExrsTENcE: CHRISTENDOM
AND THE TURKS 173
XXVII. THE COUNTRY-HOUSE RADICALS r 79
XXVIII.
THE OUTBREAK OF THE GREAT REBEL-
LION 189
XXIX.
THE SOCIAL CAUSES OF THE GREAT REBEL-
LION 195
XXX. I:
THE MYTH OF CHARLES A TERCENTEN-
206
ARY OCCASION
XXXI.
'ErKON BASILIKE': THE PROBLEM OF THE
KING's BooK 2 r 1
XXXII.
THE QUAKERS 22!
�:XXIII.
HUGUENOTS AND PAPISTS 227
XXXIV. THOMAS HOBBES 233
XXXV. THE ANTI-HOBBISTS 239
XXXVI. 244
CLARENDON AND THE GREAT RI<,BELLION
XXVII. Rr,vour-
MACAULAY AND THE GLoRrous
TION 249
XXXVIII.
THE MARQUIS OF HALIFAX
XXXIX.
THE SPANISH ENLIGHTENMENT 260
XL.
THE FAUSTIAN HISTORIAN: JACOB BURCK-
HARDT 273
XLI. 279
LYTTON STRACHEY AS HISTORIAN
XLII. KARL MARX AND THE STUDY OF HISTORY 285
CHAPTER I
THE H OLY LAND
rom one narrow area - the borderlands of Arabia and
Palestine - three great religions have been carried abroad.
F
What peculiar character gave to one corner of the earth
such spiritual concentration? For answer we must look not to
history, but to geography, or rather to historical geography. In
particular we may look to that great work, George Adam
Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land. No other book so
vividly re-creates the character of that eventful country or so
skilfully calls in the rocks and valleys to explain its three thou­
sand years of history. For the Scots professor was no academic
observer: he had not only read but ridden his way through
every corner of his subject. And in the end it was not only past
history that he explained. Twenty years later Palestine became
once more a battleground of great armies, and the book which
was written for scholars became the manual of statesmen. The
Prime Minister, Lloyd George, was 'absorbed' by it; the victori­
ous General Allenby carried it with him on his campaign; it was
used at the Peace Conference; and the first High Commissioner,
before taking up the government of the new Mandate, sought
out, as his adviser, the Hebrew scholar from Aberdeen.
What is the essential, the permanent character of Palestine?
From the first it has been double: Palestine is both 'the bridge
between Asia and Africa' and 'the refuge of the drifting popula­
tions of Arabia'. Great armies have passed through it to battle:
the armies of Sennacherib and the Pharaohs, of Cambyses and
Alexander, of Ptolemies and Seleucids, of Pompey and Caesar,
the Caliphs and the Crusaders, Sultan Selim and Mehemet Ali,
Napoleon and Allenby. Monotonously they have followed the
same great highways, picked up in the Serbonian Bog the same
fearful plague, and fought their crucial battles in the same
natural theatre, the passage and gateway of Jezreel. There
Sisera and Saul were destroyed; there, at Megiddo, Josiah was
I
2 HISTORCAL ESSAYS
destroyed by Pharaoh Necho; and the greatest battle of all,
where the Kings of the Earth are to be destroyed, was naturally
placed, by the heated Zealots who imagined it, at Mcgiddo, or
Armageddon.
But what were these Kings of the Earth and their great
transient armies to the mountain tribes of Israel? Like the
beduin of the desert in our wars, they looked down upon the
passing chariots from above and only descended afterwards, for
the leavings. For the Hebrews were a highland people: their
very language shows it. Their word for valley is 'depth', their
visitors 'come up', even their hilltops are viewed from above.
To them horses and chariots were exotic beasts and unfamiliar
machines. All the great chariot-rides in the Bible take place in
the north, in Samaria. The horse, until Solomon, was not used;
if captured, it was hamstrung; and the Prophets, those die-hard
conservatives, continued to frown upon it as an irreligious
novelty. It was in 'the high places of Israel' that the Hebrews
settled; it was there that their own unique history took place;
th�y left the valleys to foreign armies and caravans, the
sea coast to the sea-faring Phoenicians and the sea-borne Phili­
stines.
Furthermore, these drifting tribes of Arabia who had settled
in Palestine were both wedged in and split up by the shape of the
land. On the east the Jordan, sunk in its tropical valley, is not,
like other rivers, a trade-route: it is a barrier. On the west the
inhospitable sea coast was not, like the tempting archipelago of
the Greeks, a highway to other continents: it was 'a stiff, stormy
line', a border, a horizon. There is no word in Hebrew for a
bridge - no bridge over their only river; nor for harbour either
- no harbour in their only sea. And between these two bar­
riers the country is further broken up into 'shelves and coigns'
into which the swarming clans of Arabia fitted themselves by
tribes and, thus fitted, preserved, as in Alpine cantons, their
different cultures.
Thus when history first lights up within Palestine, what we see is a
confused medley of clans - all that crowd of Canaanites, Amorites,
Perizzites, Hivites, Girgashites, Hittites, sons of Anak and Zamzum�
mim which is so perplexing to the student and yet in such thorough
harmony with the natural conditions of the country and with the
THE HOLY LAND 3
rest of the history . . . . P alestine, formed as it is, and surrounded as it
is, is emphatically a land of tribes.
At first it was the land of these Canaanite tribes, scattered and
sedentary, an agricultural and commercial people dwelling in
strong places and practising like all primitive agricultural
peoples, orgiastic rites. Each tribe had its tutelary deity, like
local madonnas in Italy: they 'practised abominations' and
worshipped Baal 'on every high hill and under every green tree'.
Later, when the Hebrews conquered and absorbed them and
became, like them, an agricultural people, they fitted as natur­
ally, tribe by tribe, into the same local niches and adopted as
naturally the same local cults. They 'went a-whoring after
strange gods'.
And yet, in the end, they were not seduced. They did not per­
severe along the path of their predecessors. Why not? Once
again geography offers an answer. For over and above the local
subdivisions of Palestine stands a greater, more fundamental
division: the division between Arabia and Syria, between the
desert and the sown. The Hebrews were not, like their
predecessors, a sedentary, agricultural people: they wen�
beduin from the desert and their religion was the religion
of the desert, 'the sour Wahaby fanaticism' and yet also 'the
great antique humanity of the Semitic desert' which Doughty
afterwards found in his solitary Arabian wanderings. From the
nomadic Kenites, the outcast tinkers of the desert, they had
learned their grim religion, the worship of Y ahveh, the god of
the volcano in Sinai; and now they carried it from 'the waste,
the howling wilderness' into 'the land of corn and wine' which
they had conquered. Then the miracle happened. Absorbed,
Canaanised, civilised, they yet contrived to retain their desert
religion with its violence and its humanity. The Old Testament,
in so far as it is history, is the history of a great ideological
struggle: a struggle between the invading gods of the desert and
the native gods of the sown.
How splendid are the stories of its human agents! Politic
kings, setting up their new regality with its officers and tax­
gatherers and incorporated court-chaplains, might seek to tame
the old aristocratic anarchy of the desert; but always the beduin
with their marahouts, the prophets, intervened. Sometimes their