Laudator Temporis Acti

H.R. Trevor-Roper (1914-2003), "Twice Martyred: The Engish Jesuits and Their Historians," Historical Essays (London: Macmillan & Co Ltd, 1963), pp. 113-118 (at 116-117):

For what is the technique of these new manipulators of devoted lives? The basic principles are simple. First, there is the distorting background. Nowadays, to carry conviction, a historian must document, or appear to document, his formal narrative, but his background, his generalisations, allusions, comparisons remain happily free from this inconvenience. This freedom is very useful: against an imaginary background even correctly stated facts can be wonderfully transformed. If Elizabethan government, for instance, is regularly described as 'totalitarian', if priests are sent to 'concentration-camps', if Catholic plots are darkly compared with the burning of the Reichstag, then an image is created which, though undocumented, dominates the mere detail for which alone the author takes responsibility. Moreover, such a background does not even need imagination. Pedestrian apologists who play for safety can construct it very effectively by mere omission. Just as Fr. Philip Hughes has contrived to write a portentous three-volume history of that 'immensely harmful' movement, the English Reformation, in which the great religious movement for reform of the Church is unobserved and such details as the burning of Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley are never explicitly mentioned, so Fr. Devlin, in his new biography of Robert Southwell,¹ contrives never to make clear the interesting and relevant fact that throughout Southwell's mission England and Spain were at war. This is a remarkable achievement. Needless to say, it greatly helps his argument. The argument, it may be added, can do with such help.

The second principle of this new technique is more positive. It is the principle of unequal scholarship: the scrupulous straining at small historical gnats which diverts attention from the silent digestion of large and inconvenient camels. How choosily these Jesuit historians nibble when the matter is of no great significance (thus winning tributes to their scholarship from lay reviewers), and yet what enormous gulps they take when no one — they think — is looking! How learnedly Fr. Caraman, for instance, annotates those minor recusant gentry, tracing their manors, their marriages and their movements; and yet, when it comes to a significant point — say, Sir Robert Cecil's attitude to the Spanish claims — he unhesitatingly gives us an answer which, though convenient to him, can be blown sky-high by mere reference to the sources. How learnedly Fr. Devlin refutes his own misquotation from Professor Conyers Read (whose name he regularly mis-spells); and yet, when a document is inconvenient, he summarily declares it first a probable, then, by an inconspicuous transition, a known forgery! Whenever the Jesuits are involved in controversy, their version of the facts, we are told, is 'the only accurate account', 'far closer to the truth' than any other, contemporary or modern. On the Babington Plot, for instance, through whose intricacies Fr. Devlin has led the grateful Fr. Caraman, modern scholars receive 'serious reproach' for accepting 'a whole edifice of lies ... in violation of the known truth' — i.e. what a Jesuit said was the truth.

¹Christopher Devlin, S.J., The Life of Robert Southwell: Poet and Martyr (London 1956).