Portraits and Miniatures(122)

In Macaulay’s case in addition it meant that he was infused by a liberal optimism which made him see history as the unfolding of a story of almost continuous improvement, and was saved from blandness only by the resonance of his style and a determination to see that the ‘Tory dogs always got the worst of it’. In G. M. Trevelyan’s case it meant that he started off from an attitude at least as partisan and rather more radical than that of his great-uncle. His early books on English history could see no good in Tories from Bolingbroke to Wellington and his three volumes on Garibaldi were not merely anti-Bourbon and anti-Papist but anti any form of religion as well. But he was always a somewhat ‘pi’ and even priggish radical. Although he respected Keynes’s intellect, he disliked Bloomsbury in general and Lytton Strachey in particular, disapproving of the irreverence of Eminent Victorians.

Bertrand Russell’s life he found a little rackety for his taste, and also thought him a weak walker, for when they once went on a West Country tour together Russell stipulated that they should do no more than twenty-five miles a day, which Trevelyan accepted until the last day when he insisted on going off on his own for a serious walk. (Professor Cannadine also tells us that when going on his honeymoon Trevelyan insisted on getting out of the train at Truro and walking the last forty miles to the Lizard. This story is however vitiated by the fact that the distance from Truro to the Lizard is under thirty miles; the Russell one is better authenticated.)

With Russell, however, after an intermediate coolness there was a later reconciliation (which death if nothing else precluded in Strachey’s case) and Trevelyan was moved and satisfied by Russell’s BBC eightieth birthday tribute to him. With Beatrice Webb he achieved the remarkable feat of making her half mock him for his over-planned self-discipline. Meeting him when he was nineteen, she wrote: ‘He is bringing himself up to be a great man, is precise and methodical in all his ways, ascetic and regular in his habits, eating according to rule, “exercising” according to rule, going to bed according to rule, and neither smoking, tea or coffee drinking, nor touching alcohol.’

This somewhat self-regarding youth of 1895 turned into George Trevelyan the radical of 1900-14. By 1925, however, he had become a quiet Conservative, well attuned to the age of Baldwin, whom he greatly admired, because he thought him country loving, the ‘kindest of Prime Ministers’ and not at all a cad, unlike Lloyd George, F. E. Smith, Beaverbrook, and probably Churchill as well. Trevelyan, in the 1930s, although greatly disliking the dictators, became a rather depressed supporter of appeasement. Once Baldwin had gone John Simon and Walter Runciman became his favourite ministers. He lost his early optimism as well as his early radicalism, believed that most things in the world were getting worse, and that the best thing was resignedly to make them do so as slowly as possible. This did, however, make him a dedicated and effective supporter of the National Trust.

In the pre-war decade, however, his main role was to be the chronicler to whom the nation confided its past. As Cannadine puts it: ‘He was Britain’s unofficial Historian Laureate, the Hereditary Keeper of the Nation’s Collective Memory, combining - in terms of a later generation of practitioners - the popular appeal of Sir Arthur Bryant, Sir John Plumb, A. J. P. Taylor and Dame Veronica Wedgwood with the Establishment connections of Lord Blake, Lord Briggs, Lord Bullock and Professor Owen Chad-wick.’ In 1935 he wrote the Jubilee speech which King George V delivered in Westminster Hall. In 1937 he became a member of the Order of Merit. In 1940 Churchill, forgiving of his affection for Baldwin, his respect for Neville Chamberlain and his acceptance of appeasement, made him Master of that greater Trinity in the Fens. It was an appropriate appointment, for he was a quintessential Cambridge figure, and Trinity College, then even more than now, was the quintessence of that university. His combination of unworldliness, frenetic walking, blandness of style and disapproval of cruel wit in others, would have been difficult to imagine in an Oxford context.

Trevelyan’s reputation as an historian barely survived his death in 1962. He is now amongst the great unread, widely regarded by the professionals of a later generation as a pontificating old windbag, as short on cutting-edge as on reliable facts. Professor Cannadine has done a brilliant job of rehabilitation, the more impressive because it is surprising (to me at least) that he should have wanted to do so. He is in general irreverent and might easily have been expected to mock Trevelyan. The fact that he does not do so in no way prevents him being taut and entertaining.