Electric Review

RIP: Lord Dacre of Glanton
Peterhouse contra Trevor-Roper

We were a ghastly crew

Lord Dacre has written an article (‘The Cambridge Connection’, in the Sunday Telegraph of 26 March 1989) which describes the “neo-Toryism of the 1980s” as being not only “Cambridge-fed” but also a “grim and “doctrinaire” continuation of the “Cambridge Puritanism” of the 17th century. Lord Dacre obviously dislikes both the “Peterhouse Right” and the “neo-Toryism of the 1980s”. In truth, with one possible exception, no member of either could reasonably be thought of as “puritan”. In both there is a strong streak of sceptical satire, both about Lord Dacre himself and about the egalitarianism of his Oxford friends, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir Stuart Hampshire and the late Sir Alfred Ayer. The idea of the neo-Toryism of the 1980s being “puritan” rises into farce when applied to Professor Norman Stone who, until he became Professor of Modern History at Oxford, had spent his adult life at Cambridge, and though not part of the “Peterhouse” new Right, was certainly a “Cambridge neo-Tory of the 1980s”. In teaching his tale of the Peterhouse Right, Lord Dacre has become an Ancient Mariner, though clubmen in London, colleagues in the House of Lords, journalists on the Isle of Dogs, hosts in American universities and innocent fellows of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges must find it difficult to understand the compulsion to slay the birds that made his breeze to blow.

— Footnote 12, ‘The Sources of the New Right: Irony, Geniality & Malice’, by Maurice Cowling, Encounter [November 1989, Vol LXXIII, No. 4]

Hugh Trevor-Roper, lauded in death by his friends, has even so failed to escape his fate. Or as his fine, feline obituary in The Times put it:

In all public respects, except in Peterhouse, the 1980s would have been Trevor-Roper’s Indian summer if identification of the Highland kilt as the invention of a Quaker ironmaster in Lancashire in the 1780s had not been followed by the discovery, in relation to the Hitler Diaries, that he had mainly enemies in the media, where previously he had supposed that he had mainly friends.

Understandably — and it is a great thing still for a historian of any kind to enter the news pages of a British broadsheet newspaper — press coverage of Lord Dacre’s death has dwelt upon what nowadays interests journalists and journalism most of all: interaction with journalism and journalists. In truth, of vastly more account to the life of this self-willed public figure (whose studied ignorance as to why Mrs Thatcher saw fit to give the first historical peerage of her reign to his worldly self, we can safely discount) was the battle late enough in life he entered into with the “Peterhouse School”. The name for this sect was coined by Joe Lee, now heir-apparent to R.B. McDowell as Ireland’s Greatest Living Historian, but long ago a post-graduate at Peterhouse. And Hugh Trevor-Roper came into physical contact with it when, one year into his peerage, a group of Peterhouse fellows clustered round Maurice Cowling engineered his election as Master of Cambridge’s oldest and smallest college. This, as they said to each other at the time, was a joke of the Peterhouse School of history, which is to say, few understood it, and of those who did, fewer still cared for it. So it was, that for his full seven year term, from 1980 till 1987, the college was, in Dacre’s own words, racked by civil war.

I remember asking Maurice Cowling during a supervision — one of those three hour specials, ending long after midnight — what he thought a Powell premiership in the 1970s would have been like. ‘The first two years would have been unalloyed pleasure’, he replied, ‘and then we would have had a civil war’. To this day I can never quite be sure whether that was disapprobation or not. After Mr Cowling retired in 1993, one of my conversational staples was to relate how ardently I wished Heath had won the 1974 general Election. My stated reasoning being that, as the popular tide against the unions hadn’t by then turned, yet Heath’s government would, simply in order to govern, still have had to defeat the miners, force would have been required: and from that, the Right would have had a much more satisfactory founding myth than the rather tame and civil defeat of the miners a decade later. This too, the desire to see miners’ shot, was a joke. Like most told in Peterhouse it didn’t travel, and the point of telling it was as obscure then as it is to relate it now. However what permanently marked apart the temper of Dacre’s history, from that of Cowling’s, was, to my mind, this humour. That history itself was there to be laughed at is what separates the School from its critics, who in turn accuse it of more than a degree of studied, prolix pointlessness. This error has consequences, as we will see, for more than just frenetic failings in tone.

Stern, unrefutable and arcane
In Britain the achievement of the Right in the post-war period can best be summed up in one potent word: Thatcherism. What intellectuals, even anti-intellectuals, thought of this, and what their thought contributed to it, served as a kind of deconstructionalist chorus, even as Thatcherism careened about the stage, in the 1980s. (Incidentally, did you know that Mr Cowling invented Deconstruction? Maurice told me this on the afternoon he went off to the Senate House to vote in favour of the University giving Derrida his honorary degree — the Frenchman’s name having raised, from the defenders of academic truth and excellence and other things besides, a great fuss against him. Cowling’s epating of his academic peers was by then late-period mastery, so reflexive and easy came the teasing, and was a pleasure to behold; that the claim itself was both another joke, and at the same time strangely true, is another of the many historiographical tricks which have befallen Maurice Cowling, and we’ll return to this series of misfortunes.) Naturally in the immediate aftermath, which is where we are now, but not for much longer, this has become a neglected field of enquiry. In 1989, one calendar year before the fall, it was, however, an apt moment to stake Peterhouse’s claim. That this can be done, is the measure of why we should try spending some more time with Mr Cowling’s challenging sentences, instead simply of enjoying the elegant clarity of Lord Dacre.

Mr Cowling choose as his weapon the ailing Encounter, whose metastatic journey from the highest High Liberalism to the rankest neo-conservatism would undoubtedly have taken place, had she not expired shortly after Maurice’s explantion of ‘the sources of the new right’. As it was, Encounter was entering a pre-senile stage of fitful, almost black Toryism, and here it was, to coincide with CUP’s reissue of Mill and Liberalism that Thatcherism was accounted for, and in the words of a defiant Julius Gould [replying along with other cited luminaries in a subsequent issue], many of the protagonists of the age were, to all appearances, ‘[tested] on our conservatism as if we were a set of ageing candidates for the Cambridge Tripos’. This essay, whose section on academia and the Right is reproduced below, in turn was adapted as the introduction to that 2nd edition of Mill and Liberalism. In essence, as Gould pointed out, Mr Cowling was afforded the opportunity to review his own book — ‘Few authors are given such an irresistible opportunity: and the book is duly praised for its prescience and other sterling qualities’.

What makes Mill and Liberalism’s ability to be effectively auto-reviewed as a (1963) prophecy of the British New Right still more startling is that intellectually it derives from, of all things, an unpublished Tory pamphlet on the ‘liberal intelligentsia’s’ morally outraged reaction to the Suez crisis; precisely that, ‘an intelligentsia which could work up the moral indignation that the English intelligentsia had worked up about this question in late 1956 was so narrow and naïve as to be intellectually offensive’. The book’s infamous contention was that:

The real world was not a liberal world, as the Marxists of the late 1960s were also to point out. It treated Liberalism as an élitist delusion and implied that it was Christianity which should underpin national solidarity . . . Intellectually it was aggressive. It argued that Mill had not only been advocating a post-Christian religion, which he had pretended duplicitously not to be advocating, but had also suffused his advocacy with the same sort of liberal intolerance with which the higher Liberals and liberal collectivists in all political parties and all parts of the intellectual spectrum in the 1950s had been suffusing theirs.

From this we got the story, and for our purposes, we’re interested in being reminded why it is that the late Lord Dacre, drawing the Tory whip all the while, was merely master of Peterhouse, and not at all a Tory historian.

Solving virtue

The Academics
“The Peterhouse Right” is the name given by their critics to a small group of dons whose teaching and writing is about the history of politics, art, thought and religion and who share a common connection with Peterhouse — the oldest and in the 20th century one of the more admirable colleges in the University of Cambridge. Though their cohesiveness should not be exaggerated and some of them are no longer at Peterhouse, its members share common prejudices — against the higher liberalism and all sorts of liberal rhetoric, and in favour of irony, geniality and malice as solvents of enthusiasm, virtue, and political elevation.

The Peterhouse Right wishes elites and establishments to eschew guilt and self-doubt, to perform the duties of their stations, and to avoid unrealistic claims about their rectitude. They tend to assume, ignorantly and flippantly, what Professor John Vincent has stated in criticism of the Institute of Economic Affairs — that “night-school economics”, though preferable to Keynesian economics, is politically boring. More positively, they state that government and politics have dignities, languages and reasons of their own, that these require illusionless refurbishing in every generation, and that they should not be subordinated to even the most compatible of economic doctrines. Dr [David] Watkin, Professor Vincent, myself, Dr [Edward] Norman, and Dr Jonathan Clark believe in “Conservatism” as secular truth as little as they believe in “Liberalism” or “Socialism” as secular truth, and they accompany distaste for “secular truth” with the belief, whether issuing in religious observance or not, that “secular truth” tends to be solemn and that secular truths tend to the dissolution of Christianity.

The Peterhouse Right is an academic right — a set of monastic, or country, cousins who have some journalistic connections and weak political connections. Its chief political success has been the election of Lord Dacre to the Mastership of Peterhouse, not so much on the ground that he was the best candidate — such a consideration seldom operating in elections of this sort — as on the ironical, genial or malicious grounds that, in the circumstances in which he was being elected, he was the candidate most likely to serve everyone right, including (as they knew at the time, and as it turned out) themselves.

The Peterhouse Right includes only a small number of the Fellows of Peterhouse, among whom there is much solid worth, a variety of opinions, religious or otherwise, and a certain amount of scientific distinction; but a number of the journalists and publicists of the New Right have been under-graduates, graduates or fellows of the College, and Mrs Shirley Letwin was an unbeneficed teacher there for a number of years after her resignation from the London School of Economics in the 1970s.

Between the Peterhouse Right and the London School of Economics Right there are affinities, Dr John Charvet, Dr Alan Beattie, and Professor William Letwin and Mrs Shirley Letwin of the LSE being enemies of both collectivism and liberal certainty, Professor Kenneth Minogue having an Oakeshottian hatred of “ideological shibboleths” and “the liberal mind”, and Elie Kedourie, with whom the anti-secular affinity is strongest, presenting the secular problem in a Muslim and Jewish as well as in a Christian framework. It is also the case, though it may not be important, that Mrs Letwin and Professor Minogue are directors of the Centre for Policy Studies.

[©Encounter, November 1989]

Anyone wishing to consult the introduction to the 2nd edition, as this essay became, can consult for themselves those memorialised for the school in any of a series of very, very long footnotes, great lists of names being another of Maurice’s under-appreciated jokes.

The Rest of the Right
Encounter subsequently gave almost as much space in a later, and near-final, issue so that various of the listed victims might reply in kind. As already mentioned, Julius Gould was one, and he was joined by sometime fellow of Peterhouse (and Sun columnist) John Vincent, Max Beloff, and, courtesy of The Independent, by Trevor-Roper himself. Both Gould and Lord Beloff took especial exception to one particular passage, namely Mr Cowling’s avowal that, though ‘there are no skeletons in my own cupboard, [I] certainly said, and probably believed, in the late 1960s that, if the revolting students of the Student Revolution were revolting against Lord Beloff, Lord Annan and Sir Isaiah Berlin, there must have been something to be said in their favour’’. For poor Lord Beloff this espirit was quite too much, and refuge was sought in pedantic denial of technical liability — ‘we had no authority over them, how could they have revolted against us?’ was his claim. In fact, so successful was the original barb, that even this mildest of men was lured into the same briar patch, declaring windily that, ‘Central Office is perhaps a better place from which to study the Conservative Party than Peterhouse’. Julius Gould also became overwrought by sight of the very same passage, his repudiation of this fancy being that the student revolution, far from being laughable and absurd, was a very real and terrible thing, that its ‘leaders had more sinister preoccupations’ than Mr Cowling could possibly conceive of.

This fearfulness — as displayed above by Gould and Beloff — is a repeated contrast between the School’s more relaxed approach, and that of too many of its confrères on the Right. Whatever else can be said about the late Hugh Trevor-Roper, it has to be admitted that he did not panic. It’s fair to say that he probably would not have escaped unharmed into the Combination Room had he betrayed even once a whiff of fear during his seven years at Peterhouse. John Vincent, habitually pugnacious, illustrated in his response yet another of this trend’s weaknesses though. Professor Vincent took Mr Cowling to task for not watching enough television, his analysis therefore being entirely deficient because he lacks all understanding of Liberalism’s tyrannical monopoly of the medium. Calmly Cowling responds, and it’s as true today as it was then, that the situation is not quite as uniformly bad as all that. This being the sensible reaction, but also, surely, an accurate one too? Television’s hardly the demon king of so many Right wing imaginations, and its casting there as, does tend to illuminate a defeatist inclination to displacement theory: simply put, we have bigger problems than Orla Guerin.

Still treads the shadow of his foe

By far the best response (to ‘the Sources of the new Right’) came from Lord Dacre. Teasing, elusive and determined, it took the fight to Mr Cowling with the weapons to hand, and paid the unavoidable compliment of engagement thereby. What then, Trevor-Roper wondered, was the ‘philosophy’ of the Peterhouse Right?

The opinions which I have heard from them at that high table, or read in their published writings, are indeed distinctive. They have coherence and pedigree. Some of them were uttered at similar high tables, with increasing freedom as the decanters circulated, in the time of George I and George III (or, as some of the Peterhouse Right would now say, of James III). That the Revolution of 1688 was a crime, the Enlightenment a disaster; that Bishop Warburton was the profoundest thinker of the 18th century and Dr Pusey of the 19th; that “the confessional state” should never have been replaced by a plural society; that “the wrong side” won the First World War and the Hitler should have been allowed to win the second — these opinions can no doubt be argued, although their present advocates prefer merely to assert them. As Mr Cowling has written, there is no point in arguing one’s beliefs: one should impose them by other, more effective means. I am not now contesting his views, or his right to utter them. I merely wonder how they can have led to the free-market Toryism of the 1980s.

We can perhaps admire the asperity of the attack on Mr Cowling’s teaching methods most of all. Entirely untrue of course, but, all the same, a cheering insult to see being let fly. Cowling’s corrosive point about the futility of teaching as a transmission route for ideas is wonderfully debilitating even to dons of the stripe of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Whom, we should perhaps acknowledge, was defended by his friends on grounds utterly inapplicable to Maurice Cowling. In a posthumous interview published in the Telegraph, his former pupil, Graham Turner, allows Dacre to say, ‘I was only interested in the quality of their work, though I did find it socially more congenial to deal with public school boys because they were more at ease and came from the world I knew’. Which wasn’t in the broadest sense true from this product of the Northumbrian haute-bourgeoisie (his favourite raking assault on Petrean reaction was always to offer psychological insights as to the no-doubt petty-bourgeois origins of the offender).

The laughing voice of The Times’ obituary sums the process up in lapidary fashion:

Trevor-Roper was neither a Tory nor an intellectual Conservative. He imputed snobbery to Conservative intellectuals if they came from the lower middle classes, while making it clear that his pin-up was the Whig grandee or his elegant son, whom perhaps he had taught at Christ Church and who shared the family assumption that fanaticism, religious or otherwise, rose, like Hitler and the Franciscans, from the lower classes upwards.

Trevor-Roper gained a scholarship to pre-war Charterhouse, whereas we can safely guess that the obituarist, living longest and laughing last, passed his London county 11-plus and headed towards Battersea Grammar School.

We should return though to such specifics as Lord Dacre was willing to offer, from a point inside the Right, against Mr Cowling and his sources:

Liberalism, that is their enemy: the Liberalism which undermined the Anglican monopoly and the cosy “Old Corruption” of the 18th century and destroyed their protective tests; which allowed scholars to question authority and orthodoxy; and which, by these betrayals, brought us where we are. Perhaps by preaching thus, the Peterhouse Right has given some indirect support to Mrs Thatcher, as enemies of her enemies, but they face opposite ways: she forward to free capitalism, they back to the cave of Polyphemus or Cacus: no doubt excellent men in their way (though of unpolished manners) but hardly free-marketeers: rather reactionary members of the trade union of Amalgamated Troglodytes.

My general point is simple. As there is Toryism and Toryism, so there is liberalism and liberalism. To identify all liberalism, in all ages, with the excesses of permissiveness and radical chic (which I dislike as much as any), and to attack it as such, wholesale, from an inaccessible cavern receding into an indefinite past, seems to me an odd way of teaching civic virtue, true learning, or even history. And I doubt if it has had the slightest effect on the electorate, the Tory party, or the government of our country.

This bold denial of the project is satisfyingly complete in its claims, but it does seem to miss the meta-point. It’s not here so much the fear, familiar as it is, of phantoms like ‘permissiveness and radical chic’ that alerts us to the danger. Instead it’s that quaint defence of the questioning spirit, that primordial urge to scepticism that seems so superficially attractive (‘the hallmark of the protestant mind’ — claimed, rightly, for both men, low church each in their own way) which prompts us to realise, for Dacre too there was a project. There was dissatisfaction with the world-as-it-is, and an informed desire to change it, and for purposes of his own subscription. In, again, the superior words of The Times:

Trevor-Roper did not believe that orthodox societies could survive. His ideal was a society so much “at ease with itself” (a phrase he seems to have invented) that it felt no need for an “orthodoxy”. His lost leader was Erasmus, whose Reformation having been submerged by Protestant and Counter-Reformation bigotry, had had to wait until the 18th-century Enlightenment for its fulfilment.

When we see it like that, now we see what the game was about.

Why anti-popery isn’t enough

Public and Private Doctrine, Cowling’s Festschrift (edited by Michael Bentley), contains characteristic delights such as Peter Ghosh’s sustained assault on Mr Cowling, which lays down pretty firmly what the author think history’s verdict on the Great Man’s ‘doctrine’ should be. One charge — entirely justified — relates to the breach that occurred between Cowling and Dacre after the latter’s election as Master. For Cowling had been a fan; for Cowling it was, during his year as literary editor on Gale’s Spectator, who brought back ‘Mercurius Oxoniensis’. This, famously, being Trevor-Roper’s pseudonym for a series of tart articles on contemporary Oxford, executed in flawless faux-17th century English. What drove the two men apart? It’s not as if there were that many Tory historians on the go, however you want to call that, that a falling out had much to commend itself. Cowling could admire Trevor-Roper from a distance for what qualities he had to offer (Ghosh gives him the status of an opponent of the improving, stressing that what Dacre, loyal to ‘liberal concepts of rational argument and regular procedure’, could not abide in Cowling close-up was his ‘arbitrariness, dogma and deviousness’) but not resident in Peterhouse.

Public cynics have pointed to the salient difference between mister Cowling and Baron Dacre. That one had received the Regius chair at Oxford (and repaid the favour by having the gifting Prime Minister elected Chancellor), whilst the other amused himself by writing letters such as his effort to the New York Review of Books that starts, ‘It is one of the pleasures of being a fellow of Peterhouse that one can be reviewed by one’s own Master’ (it is in this communication that he cheerfully signs up for the ‘opacity’ of his ‘cave’ being ‘deliberate and hermeneutic’ so you can, perhaps, guess at the tenor of his Master’s review!) This, obviously, won’t do. The key, I think, is religion; though the partisan in me, (the cheap party hack to be precise) also has to wonder whether, up close against each other, the man willing to be baited, as well as bait, was always going to come out on top. We should, all things considered, note the generosity of The Times obituarist once more: ‘[Trevor-Roper] was one of the most wonderful, prolific and pungent of letter-writers; his letters, if they are ever collected, will be his memorial and the tombstones of his enemies’.

What they’ll have to say about the villain at the centre of this vignette, we will have to wait and see:

Trevor-Roper was elected to the Mastership of Peterhouse because (like his two immediate predecessors) he was 67 and would be unable to do much damage; his supporters expected his rancorousness to add to the gaiety of the SCR. Trevor-Roper, however, typecast them as inward-looking reactionaries, and made himself attractive to their critics. At the same time he talked about the college to the newspapers, and to anyone else who would listen, continuously and obsessively. He failed signally to remove an offending fellow from his fellowship, and instituted an extraordinary correspondence about the college porters’ willingness to stand up when the bursar, Major-General Crookenden, entered the porters’ lodge, but not when he, Lord Dacre, did

We can ourselves, at once, see just how victory in this epic struggle came to the forces of childish reaction. What we make of these methods is, I suppose, mostly commentary on our own temperaments, and therefore as revealing and unrewarding as most psychological insights are.

If there is, in truth, a profound cleavage between the two that was exposed when Maurice became legendary and Trevor-Roper became Master and resident, it must come in the form of a primarily religious dispute. The testimony on offer from the Times is dressed up as a joke, as you would by now expect, so its seriousness remains a private, unaccounted for dilemma.

It is not certain whether Trevor-Roper was over-wooed as a young man by the Oxford Jesuits, or whether there were other reasons for his enmity to religious orthodoxy, both Christian and Rabbinical. When accused by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne of not being a Christian, he responded, not for the first time in his life, with the threat of litigation. He would probably have described himself, if pressed, as being, like Mercurius Oxoniensis, “a sound Protestant and a loyal member of the true Church established by law among us”: he was certainly ready to embarrass rationalists by pointing out that the witch-craze, so far from dying with the Renaissance, had not become a holocaust until the Renaissance. But his guiding instinct was the rationalist instinct to identify Roman Catholicism with Marxism or Cardinal Bellarmine with Himmler, and to put the worst interpretation possible on the fact that, without the Church, Christianity would not have survived.

The dilemma here is none other than what we believe the belief of the relaxed, low church Cowling to be. Clearly, whatever it is, it lacks the driving tension of Dacre’s relationship with his church, but at the same time, it scarcely seems unreasonable to speculate on whether the entire oeuvre can be blamed on Cowling’s personal relationship with his God, who may, so very easily, and certainly unlike Lord Dacre’s, exist.

Michael Portillo, and other failures

One couldn't conceive of spending an evening in a pub with the ex-Indian policemen, whereas Philby was a good drinking companion and I enjoyed his company. Looking back, though, there was something mysterious about him. He never engaged you in serious conversation — it was always irony. And when he blocked the circulation of a document which I had written about the power struggle that we discovered was developing between Himmler and the German General Staff, I did start to ask myself questions about him.

As for Blunt, who was also around at the time, I disliked everything about him. He was an intellectual snob of a particularly Cambridge kind. He exuded an assumption of intellectual and personal superiority which irritated me a great deal. He was a Fellow of Trinity, I was a nobody. He was supercilious and hautain, and he had this incredibly affected voice. Dick White later told me that he couldn't stand him either.

[— Trevor-Roper to Turner on his wartime service in military intelligence]

Against Cowling the great charge made is that his attitude to ‘Liberalism’, however capitalised, is hysteria — that for a large majority of reasonable conservatives, the identification at the present moment of anything amounting to liberalism as the once, now and always enemy is foolishness verging on wanton self-indulgence. In favour of Cowling is his very assertion of the existence of liberalism, all-pervasive and habitually self-denying as it is, that stands out as his achievement. By pointing it up when it really would much rather deny being there at all, Mr Cowling has told us more about Liberalism than Liberalism ever will.

In Cowling’s own words, of which you may argue, we have seen enough, ‘though Oakeshott is better than Hayek, neither has conceptualised the combination of politeness and negative bloodiness which is the essential antidote to liberal virtue’. Maurice’s measure is that he has, and then some. His 1989 credo stands good today:

Negative bloodiness is not an end in itself but is instrumental to the assertion of a conservative and national moral which needs active assertion when threatened. It is a temperamental as much as an intellectual characteristic and requires a tone and posture as much as it requires an argument. The innovative arguments of the last decade have been justified in terms of the prosperity they will bring and the disasters they will avoid. The best justification is this temperamental negativity which is needed everywhere — not just in the political parties but throughout the thinking classes, and as much now as at any time in the past.

Fittingly, it is the past, and what they have done to it, that ultimately divides Maurice Cowling from Hugh Trevor-Roper. The former is the advocate of academic inaction, the enemy of specialisation, the foe of professionalism, the last ditch against doctorates, and the latter the self-avowed, priggishly Orwellian seeker of linguistic, mental and no doubt, moral clarity, who rose in the world and is remembered today. Yet it is, Dacre, the man of affairs who leaves behind him some reportage, and the belle-lettrist’s neat pile of sub-clauses and no more. Whereas it is Cowling who has made — and lived to see it heard — the great point, and in so doing, revolutionised the study of his discipline. It should teach us all a lesson about intentionality, if nothing else.

, January 28, 2003 09:02 AM