Trevor-Roper, H.R. 1914-2003 (H.R. Trevor Roper, Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper)

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Trevor-Roper, H.R. 1914-2003 (H.R. Trevor Roper, Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper)

PERSONAL:

Born January 15, 1914, in Glanton, Northumberland, England; died of cancer, January 26, 2003, in Oxford, England; son of Bertie William Edward and Kathleen Trevor-Roper; married Lady Alexandra Howard-Johnston, October 4, 1954. Education: Christ Church, Oxford, B.A., 1936, M.A., 1939.

CAREER:

Oxford University, Oxford, England, research fellow at Merton College, 1937-39, at Christ Church, 1946-57, Regius Professor of Modern History, 1957-2003. Director of Times Newspapers Ltd., 1974-2003. Military service: Served as intelligence officer.

MEMBER:

Athenaeum, Savile, Beafsteak.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Chevalier in French Legion of Honor, 1975.

WRITINGS:

Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645, 1940, 2nd edition, Archon Books, 1962, Macmillan Press (Basingstoke, Hampshire), 1988.

The Last Days of Hitler, Macmillan (London, England), 1947, 4th edition, 1971, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1992.

Hitler's Secret Conversations, 1941-1944, 1953, reprinted, Octagon Books (London, England), 1972, also published in England as Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944, 1953, reprinted, Weidenfeld & Nicholson (London, England), 1973, reprinted with a new preface and introduction, Enigma (New York, NY), 2000.

The Gentry, 1540-1640, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1953.

Men and Events: Historical Essays, Harper (New York, NY), 1957, published as Historical Essays, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1957.

The Rise of Christian Europe, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1965.

George Buchanan and the Ancient Scottish Constitution, Longmans, Green (London, England), 1966.

Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1967, 2nd edition, 1972, published as The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, Harper (New York, NY), 1967, reprinted, Liberty Fund (Indianapolis, IN), 1999.

The Philby Affair: Espionage, Treason, and Secret Services, Kimber, 1968.

The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Harper (New York, NY), 1969.

The Plunder of the Arts in the Seventeenth Century, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 1970.

Queen Elizabeth's First Historian: William Camden and the Beginnings of English "Civil History," J. Cape (London, England), 1971.

A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1976, published as Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, Knopf (New York, NY), 1977.

Princes and Artists: Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg Courts, 1517-1633, Thames & Hudson (New York, NY), 1976.

Renaissance Essays, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1985.

Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1987.

From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1992.

(Translator) Bread of Exile: A Russian Family, by Dimitri Obolensky, translated by Harry Willetts, Harvill (London, England), 1999.

Europe's Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore De Mayerne, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2006.

Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London, England), 2006.

The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2008.

EDITOR

Martin Bormann, The Bormann Letters, 1954, reprinted, AMS Press (Brooklyn, NY), 1979.

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Twayne (New York, NY), 1963.

Blitzkrieg to Defeat: Hitler's War Directives, 1939-1945, Holt (New York, NY), 1964.

Essays in British History, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1964.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, McGraw (New York, NY), 1965.

The Age of Expansion: Europe and the World, 1559-1660, McGraw (New York, NY), 1968.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, Washington Square Press (New York, NY), 1968.

Winston Churchill, History of the English-Speaking Peoples, B.P.C. Publishing, 1969.

Joseph Goebbels, Final Entries 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, Putnam (New York, NY), 1978.

The Goebbels Diaries, the Last Days, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1978.

The Bormann Letters, AMS (Brooklyn, NY), 1981.

Also editor, with J.S.W. Bennett, of The Poems of Richard Corbett, 1955.

SIDELIGHTS:

Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, H.R. Trevor-Roper wrote more than fifteen books and edited ten additional works by other authors on periods in history ranging from the Roman Empire to Hitler's Germany. The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, one of his better-known works, is a collection of nine essays on topics such as Protestantism and capitalism, witch hunts, and the Counter-Reformation. G.R. Elton of the New York Times Book Review explained that in this book Trevor-Roper has "chosen to express himself in an art form rarely encountered today, especially among academics: the long essay on some major topic, embodying vast reading rather than detailed research, and concerned to establish interpretative schemes which seize upon the imagination and stimulate thought." Book Week critic J.M. Levine called the book "lively and provocative" but also expressed a wish that Trevor-Roper, at some future date, would expand upon the ideas set forth in the book to "write the major work which his theme demands."

Another of his well-known works, The Rise of Christian Europe, based on a series of his lectures at Oxford University, chronicles events from the Roman Empire through to the Middle Ages. Applauded by numerous reviewers, the book also had a few detractors. K.B. McFarlane of the New Statesman, for instance, declared it a "hasty, shallow, somewhat philistine little book … that betrays a deplorable absence of the faculty of self-criticism." A reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, on the other hand, praised it as "one of the most brilliant works of historiography to be published in England in this century."

However, Trevor-Roper was perhaps best known for his scholarly work on the life of Adolf Hitler and for the resulting book, The Last Days of Hitler. First published in 1947, the volume has undergone numerous revised editions but was never out of print during the author's lifetime. The work originated following the close of World War II, at which point there was an ongoing political debate as to the fate of Hitler and some of his closest advisors. Although it was generally believed that Hitler was dead—in fact, had committed suicide when it was clear that the Third Reich was falling and Germany would ultimately lose the war—no remains had been found, nor any documentation or eye witnesses; as a result, no one knew whether or not it was safe to truly declare Hitler dead. An officer in the British service during World War II, as well as an historian, Trevor-Roper participated in the investigation into Hitler's whereabouts and probable fate. He conducted a series of interviews of the living advisors closest to Hitler whom the Allies had been able to capture, and through these accounts determined that in all likelihood, Hitler was indeed dead. Reports suggested that Eva Braun, Hitler's long-time lover and recent wife, poisoned herself, while Hitler shot himself, both hidden at the time in the bunker that served as protection for the Reich Chancellery. As Soviet forces soon arrived on the location, they were responsible for the destruction of the evidence, having burned both Hitler's and Braun's bodies in the yard outside of the bunker. Trevor-Roper wrote his book based on these findings, as well as other accounts gleaned from the official reports resulting from the investigations. He described not only these final acts but also the mood in the bunker prior to Hitler's decision to take his life—which for a very long time was positive and insistent that the Reich would ultimately prevail. Trevor-Roper took much of his background information from diaries, letters, and other interviews taken from the last days of the war. A reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly remarked of his work: "From this fragmentary and contradictory evidence he fashioned a compelling narrative that remains definitive in its essentials."

Trevor-Roper's book on Hitler has long been considered the definitive work on the end of the leader's life. However, at one point his own expertise was called into question, as he was one of the scholars who participated in the authentication of the fraudulent Hitler diaries that were forged and passed off as genuine artifacts in 1983. He initially authenticated approximately sixty volumes of the fake books, but later recanted and admitted to his error once chemical testing of the texts proved them to be false. Despite this mark against him, he remained until his death a profound scholar and historian, well respected in his field.