Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton

Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (January 15, 1914 - January 26, 2003) was a notable historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany.]].

He was born in Glanton, Northumberland, and educated at Charterhouse and at Christ Church, Oxford in the Classics. During World War Two, Trevor-Roper served as a Military Intelligence officer. In 1945, he was ordered by the British government to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler's death and to rebut the claims of the Soviet government that Hitler was still alive and living somewhere in the West. The ensuring investigation resulted in Trevor-Roper's most famous book, 1947's The Last Days of Hitler.

In 1957 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, a post he held until 1980; subsequently he became Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Having achieved his first major success with The Last Days of Hitler (1947), he consolidated his reputation as an authority on the Third Reich with books such as Hitler's Table Talk (1953) and The Goebbels Diaries (1978), although his area of specialty was early modern Britain, especially the period around the English Civil War.

As a historian of early modern Britain, Trevor-Roper was most famous for his disputes with fellow historians such as Lawrence Stone and Christopher Hill, whose materialist explanations of the English Civil War he enthusiastically attacked. Trevor-Roper was a leading player over the so-called "storm over the gentry", a dispute with Christian Socialist R. H. Tawney and Stone over whatever the English gentry were in economic decline or were in economic advancement in the century before the English Civil War and regardless of whatever the gentry were rising or not, did this have anything to do with the outbreak of war in 1642. His attacks on the philosophies of history advanced by the historians Arnold Toynbee and Edward Hallet Carr, and on his colleague A. J. P. Taylor's account of the origins of World War II, also won Trevor-Roper wide recognition. He frequently published articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines directed to the general public (some of which were collected in his book Historical Essays in 1957), and appeared occasionally on television.

On October 4, 1954, Trevor-Roper married Lady Alexandra Henrietta Louisa Howard-Johnston (March 9, 1907 - August 15, 1997), eldest daughter of Field Marshal the Earl Haig by his wife, the former Hon. Dorothy Maud Vivian. Lady Alexandra was a goddaughter of Queen Alexandra, and had previously been married to Rear-Admiral Clarence Dinsmore Howard-Johnston, by whom she had had three children. His brother, Patrick Trevor-Roper, was a leading eye surgeon and prominent gay rights campaigner.

He was awarded a life peerage in 1979, and chose the title "Baron Dacre of Glanton".

The nadir of Dacre's career came in 1983, when, along with others, he authenticated the so-called Hitler Diaries, which later forensic examination proved to be a fake. This raised questions in the public mind not only about his perspicacity as a historian but also about his personal integrity, because The Sunday Times, a newspaper to which he regularly contributed book reviews and in whose parent company he held a financial interest, had already paid a considerable sum for the right to serialise the diaries. Dacre denied any dishonest motivation, insisting that he, like others, had made a genuine mistake. Despite the shadow that this incident cast over his later career, he continued writing (producing Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans in 1987, for example), and his work continued to be well received.

Dacre died of cancer in a hospice in Oxford, aged 89.

Work

• Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645, 1940.
• The Last Days of Hitler, 1947.
• Secret conversations, 1941-1944, 1953.
• Historical Essays, 1957.
• "The General Crisis of the Seventheenth Century" pages 31-64 from Past and Present, Volume 16, 1959.
• Blitzkrieg to defeat : Hitler's war directives, 1939-1945, 1965, 1964.
• The Rise of Christian Europe, 1965.
• Hitler's place in history, 1965.
• Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays, 1967.
• The Age of Expansion, Europe and the World, 1559-1600, edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1968.
• The Philby affair : espionage, treason, and secret services, 1968.
• The Romantic movement and the study of history: the John Coffin memorial lecture delivered before the University of London on 17 February 1969, 1969.
• Queen Elizabeth's First Historian: William Camden and the Beginning of English "Civil History", 1971.
• Hitler's table talk, 1941-44 : his private conversations, 1973.
• A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse, 1976.
• Princes and Artists: Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg Courts, 1517-1633, 1976.
• History and Imagination: A Valedictory Lecture Delivered before the University of of Oxford on 20 May 1980, 1980.
• Renaissance Essays, 1985.
• Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeeth Century Essays, 1987.
• From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, 1992.

Reference

• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh; Pearl, Valerie & Worden, Blair (editors) History and Imagination: Essays in Honor of H.R Trevor-Roper, London: Duckworth, 1981.
• Saleh, Zaki Trevor-Roper's Critique of Arnold Toynbee: A Symptom of Intellectual Chaos, Baghdad: Al-Ma'eref Press, 1958.

External links

• Obituary (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2696001.stm) from BBC News website
• Obituary (http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,882944,00.html) from GuardianUnlimited (there are several discrepancies between these sources)
• Obituary (http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=alt.obituaries&selm=beb1d3e8.0301260527.2d2013a2%40posting.google.com) posted on newsgroups by Michael Rhodes (probably more trustworthy than the pages above, actually)de:Hugh Trevor-Roper