Jonathan Sumption
Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption, OBE, PC, FSA, FRHistS, was born in 1948 so is now aged 75. Lord Sumption attended Eton College and then Magdalen College, Oxford. He went on to become an adviser to Sir Keith Joseph, writing speeches and a book for him, which situates him politically on the right wing of the Conservative Party.
Sumption has had an extraordinarily successful career as a barrister, being at one time a member of the ‘million-a-year club’, and admitting in a letter to the press to earning £1.6 million per annum. In 2011 he was appointed to the Privy Council and in 2012 to the Supreme Court.
The way the Establishment works is that, once you have achieved a certain level of competence in a great profession – and are blessed with a maze of contacts of people at similarly elevated levels of society, many of whom, of course, you first met at your expensive public school – then you find yourself being offered directorships and governorships in which you are expected to deploy this ability and influence.
Thus Sumption is a director of the English National Opera and on the governing body of the Royal Academy of Music. After all, isn’t he the kind of person you’d like to appoint to your board, if you were running one: a highly successful lawyer to deal with any legal matters; well connected with the British government (who he has represented in court) to advise on handling politicians; eminently civilised, highly presentable at receptions for likely sponsors, and so on.
And Sumption is obviously also interested in history, which is why he is a FRHistS. This means Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a title awarded to those who have made ‘an original contribution to historical scholarship’.
This distinction Sumption has achieved through the authorship of six big books about medieval history: one about medieval pilgrimage (1975), one about the Albigensian Crusade (1978), and then a multi-volumed history of the Hundred Years War. Volumes one to four of this are titled:
- Trial by Battle (1990): from the funeral of Charles IV of France in 1329 to the surrender of Calais in 1347
- Trial by Fire (1999): covering the years from 1347 to 1369
- Divided Houses (2009): covering the years from 1369 to 1399 (the overthrow of Richard II)
- Cursed Kings (2015): covering the years from 1399 to 1422 (year of the Battle of Agincourt)
A fifth and final volume is planned which will take us up to the peace of 1453 and the end of the war. I sincerely hope Lord Sumption lives to complete it.
Posh historians
Critics have compared this multi-volume history to the history of the crusades by Sir Stephen Runciman CH (Companion of Honour) FBA (Fellow of the British Academy), and to the three-volume history of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich CVO (Commander of the Royal Victorian Order), the latter of which I have reviewed in this blog:
- Byzantium: The Early Centuries by John Julius Norwich (1988)
- Byzantium: The Apogee by John Julius Norwich (1991)
- Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (1) by John Julius Norwich (1995)
- Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (2) by John Julius Norwich (1995)
Certainly, the medieval subject matter of their works and their multi-volume nature lead to the comparison. But to my eye, the most striking thing about these three award-winning historians is that they all went to Eton and are phenomenally posh.
Runciman (1903 to 2000) was the son of Walter Runciman, 1st Viscount Runciman of Doxford, and Hilda Runciman, Viscountess Runciman of Doxford. He attended Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge.
John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, attended Eton, the University of Strasbourg and then New College, Oxford. He sat as a hereditary peer in the House of Lords from 1954 to 1999.
These kind of chaps come from highly networked families and recreate them in their children.
Norwich’s daughter, the Honourable Alice Clare Antonia Opportune Cooper, attended a private school in Surrey and then St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Rather inevitably, like daddy, she became an author and her early books documented the lives of her glamorous family (her grandmother was Lady Diana Cooper, a ‘famously glamorous social figure in London and Paris’).
Alice prefers to go by the name of Artemis Cooper and is married to the eminent historian, Anthony Beevor. Beevor himself attended the very posh Winchester College (the same school as Rishi Sunak) before attending the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and then on to a career writing a series of brilliant books about aspects of the Second World War (Crete, Paris, Stalingrad, Berlin, D-Day etc), plus a history of the Spanish Civil War. I’ve reviewed some of his books:
- The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006)
- D-Day and the Battle for Normandy by Anthony Beevor (2009)
Why am I dwelling on these authors’ posh backgrounds? The point of this disquisition is to indicate how some of the great narratives of British and European history (Runciman’s history of the Crusades and Norwich’s history of the Byzantine Empire are both still in print in mass-market Penguin editions, and both are still the go-to accounts of their subjects; Sumption’s series has become the most thorough and complete account of the 100 Years War since the Victorians; Beevor has made himself into a leading historian of the Second World War) have been managed by authors from the very top of the British social scale, all from the same tiny group of premier league public schools and Oxbridge, mostly men, with the same set of values and social assumptions.
As it happens, I have just finished reading a one-volume account of the Hundred Years War by Desmond Seward. Seward was educated at the UK’s country’s leading Roman Catholic private school, Ampleforth, and then St Catherine’s College, Cambridge.
And I have lined up to read next an enormous account of Chivalry by Maurice Keen OBE, educated at top public school Winchester (like Antony Beevor and Rishi Sunak), before going on to Balliol College, Oxford.
It reinforces my point to learn that Keen is a lifelong friend of fellow historian Sir John Keegan OBE FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature), author of 25 or so books of military history, who was educated at the private Wimbledon College and then Balliol College, Oxford; and it really reinforces my point to learn that Keen is married to Keegan’s sister, Mary.
I hope you’re beginning to get a feel for the small, interconnected, high-powered networks which control the commanding heights of history writing.
Some of Keegan’s attitudes to warfare have been critiqued by Sir Michael Howard OM (Order of Merit) CH (Companion of Honour) CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) MC (Military Cross) FBA (Fellow of the British Academy) FRHistS (Fellow of the Royal Historical Society), described in the Financial Times as ‘Britain’s greatest living historian’. Howard was, of course, educated at an eminent private school, Wellington, before going on to Christ Church, Oxford.
You get the picture. Maybe it would be false and a bit paranoid to say that the writing of British, foreign and military history is controlled by a clique of like-minded, posh, private-school-educated men – not least because these days there are all kinds of younger historians, women historians, black and Asian historians, writing hundreds of books on all kinds of subjects, and working in local history, people’s history, ‘history from below’, women’s history, post-colonial history and so on.
But then, on closer examination, lots of these apparently ‘diverse’ young historians themselves turn out to have benefited from Britain’s systems of privilege. Take the eminent modern historian, Rana Mitter, whose book about Japan’s war with China I’ve reviewed. In this book Mitter mounts a sustained attack on Winston Churchill’s wartime leadership with all the confidence borne of someone who attended Lancing College (alma mater of Evelyn Waugh), and King’s College, Cambridge.
Or take Lucy Worsley OBE, a woman and therefore seen as adding to ‘diversity’, especially in the context of the umpteen TV series about history she’s presented where she relishes debunking old sexist myths about history with all the confidence of someone who attended a private preparatory school and Oxford.
Going back a couple of generations, I have on my shelves the works of two giants of history who dominated their respective fields from the 1960s to the 1990s – the ‘Marxist’ historians E.P. Thompson (historian of the English working classes) and Christopher Hill (historian of the civil wars). Both Thompson and Hill followed the old boy route of prep school, private boarding school, and Oxford, giving them the lordly confidence to write and speak as defining experts in their respective areas. Their books are still widely available as popular paperbacks (i.e. in Penguin editions).
To recap, it wouldn’t be entirely false to say that large areas of history (the crusades, Byzantium, medieval history, the British civil wars, the creation of the industrial working class, and accounts of the twentieth century’s main wars) have been dominated by these ‘old masters’, public schoolboys to a man, authors of large, scholarly, imposing works which defined their subjects for generations.
The advantages of poshness
So you can see why progressive commentators might well deplore the narrow social pool from which eminent historians past and present have, until recently, mainly been drawn, and may quote George Orwell’s minatory warning:
‘He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present, controls the past.’
They may applaud the fact that, these days, more histories are being published than ever before, with a vast industry now dedicated to restoring the role of women at every level of past society, alongside the work of black and Asian historians in ‘restoring the voices’ of, in particular, colonial subjects of the British Empire.
And yet, much though I cordially dislike the ongoing domination of their class and their privilege and their entitlements, still…it is possible to make a case that the dominance of these posh, white men in history writing has its advantages – that there is a positive merit in (some) history being researched and written by the phenomenally posh and upper class.
1. Insider experience
Take the examples I’ve cited – the Crusades, Byzantium and the Hundred Years War – the histories of these events largely consisted of political, military, diplomatic, theological and legal conflicts, and posh types are brought up a) in extended, well-connected, everso well-educated families; and b) inducted into the social networks based in their private schools which extend into the corridors of Whitehall, the Foreign Office and so on, contacts which give them insider experience of how these networks of power work in practice (‘Hi Boris. Hi Rishi’).
When it comes to recent (i.e. Second World War onwards) history, they are often related to family members who had direct experience of army or government, or have school chums from families which played important roles in these events. This gives much of their writing the insights of the insider.
2. Specialised experience
The root cause of the Hundred Years War was a legal dispute about the laws of succession to the crown of France and this was, as Sumption’s account shows in great detail, just one of a labyrinth of legal and constitutional problems / struggles / issues which bedeviled relations, not just between England and France but also with Scotland, Wales, Flanders, the Holy Roman Empire, the papacy, and so on.
So having a very experienced, senior lawyer, who really understand the legalistic nature of these conflicts, is a very big advantage in Sumption’s narrative of the war. Again, insider knowledge from the very top of the profession (the million-a-year club).
3. Suave
In the olden days the auction house Sothebys was nicknamed by others in the trade ‘Smoothyboys’, mocking their unctuous and slick employees. Another advantage of history written by the extremely posh is that their prose is often charmingly sophisticated, smooth and debonair. Norwich’s prose, in particular, is a joy to read, smooth and civilised and delicious.
There’s no denying that private school and Oxford taught these posh boys to write beautifully.
In addition to the prose itself, these smoothboys often display an entertainingly suave and sophisticated attitude to their subject matter. The very best public schools teach the aristocratic values of detachment, sang-froid, stiff upper lip and – I admit I may be exaggerating or over-noticing here, but – this superior air of civilisation and detachment, of sophisticated irony and so on, often gives the posh historians’ accounts a wonderful lightness and buoyancy, like its airbag lifts a hovercraft just clear of the sea.
Summary
I have no grand conclusion to make. These are just scattered reflections prompted by noticing how posh many of our most eminent historians are, how interconnected they are by family ties, how this may possibly be a cause for concern for those looking for an ‘Establishment’ which controls a master discourse of British history, but, on the other hand, how beautifully they often write, how measured, logically and clearly they treat their subjects, and what very enjoyable books they produce.
Books & Boots 