Janaury 26, 2003

H. R. Trevor-Roper, (January 15, 1914 to January 26, 2003), was an professor of modern history at Oxford University He was famous and controversial. His fame began when he published The Last Days of Hitler. (1947). This volume details in graceful narrative, massively footnoted, prose the last weeks in Hitler's life. Trevor-Roper was then working for the secret service in Britain, during the war. He had even cracked a German code, though nothing so difficult as the Enigma code. But with victory the government worried that there might be rumors of Hitler living elsewhere which could be used as a focus for opposition to the Allied victors. Trevor-Roper's volume was a classy solution to that concern.

Trevor-Roper had first been a Renaissance scholar. We note a cat reference from his essays (Renaissance Essays, (1985)), from a bloody era centuries before the historian's own. The Earl of Hertford, (Edmund Somerset) would at one point RULE England, but died a traitor's death -- decapitation, in 1552. Before that, and after 1537, Hertford was the intended recipient of a typical gift given to members of the highest level of society.

That gift was a bird, sent from some other European power. We have to recall at this era hunting was the great passion of royalty everywhere in Europe. Dogs, birds, even exotic beasts, were exchanged as marks of esteem. This bird, the species of which Trevor-Roper could not deduce, survived the hazards of sailing then: the bird was shipwrecked en route to England, but was still contained and recovered, and sent on to the Earl. Billingsgate was then as now, a wharf in London on the Thames. The Earl never received the bird though, because a cat killed it at Billingsgate. An event "the Lord of Hertford took right grievously."

Trevor-Roper gained fame as an intellectual, a kind of glamour which is uncommon in the United States, but not so much in England. His reputation though suffered a major blow late in his life. The author of The Last Days of Hitler was the logical choice to authenticate the newly discovered diaries of Adolph Hitler.  His assessment that the diaries were genuine, turned out to be wrong. He had missed the earmarks of this 1983 hoax. His enemies were many since Trevor-Roper was a feisty combatant on the fields of historiography.  They gloated. Still, scholarship continued.