A reply to Professor Colin Kidd on Lord Dacre's contribution to the study of Scottish history and the Scottish Enlightenment

Professor Colin Kidd's article on 'Lord Dacre and the Politics of the Scottish Enlightenment'¹ is prefaced by an Abstract which summarises Professor Kidd's main aims and conclusions. The chief aim apparently is to show how misunderstood Lord Dacre has been because of his view that the Enlightenment in Scotland was pioneered by Jacobite and Episcopalian opponents of the Presbyterian and Whig establishment. The implication is that the opposition to H.R. Trevor-Roper (latterly Lord Dacre) has come from diehard Calvinist bigots. Yet there is a puzzle here, for the Abstract also hints that Dacre's notoriety in Scottish circles was not undeserved.² This is typical of Kidd's style, for nothing is said to explain this brief off-hand statement. All the same, Professor Kidd proceeds to reprove, in no very gentle terms, anyone who has dared to question or contradict the great Oxbridge oracle. Such querulous criticisms, Kidd feels, have obscured the valuable contribution made by Dacre's 'investigation of the Scottish Enlightenment as a fascinating case study in European cultural history.'³

But are those aims realised? I would say not; for what follows the Abstract is a confused tirade based almost entirely on assumption and assertion with little or nothing adduced from actual evidence. The burden of proof sits very lightlyonProfessorKidd,andforhimunsupportedopinionmustreign supreme. The article also suffers from a basic anachronism, for it attempts to judge eighteenth-century Scotland in the light of presentday concerns and values. In a paradoxical way the whole piece suffers from what Edward Thompson deplored as 'the enormous condescension of posterity.'⁴ It is as if the problems of today must also have troubled the thinkers of the eighteenth century. These faults, along with Kidd's grasshopper style, make it hard to work out how to untease and deal with his tangled and confused contentions.

The beginning is probably as good a starting point as any for the examination of Professor Kidd's contentions. He holds that Hugh Trevor-Roper (later created a life peer as Lord Dacre of Glanton) was 'a formidable controversialist', who 'made distinctive contributions to a series of lively debates on matters of historical and public interest.'⁵ In those debates, says Kidd, he delighted in stepping on toes and 'had no respect for the frontiers which demarcate the fiercely defended bailiwicks and modest cabbage patches of less versatile academics.'⁶ Kidd's paper, it has to be said, is garlanded with such sarcastic gibes. Anyway, he lists the lively debates as follows: 'the storm over the gentry, the private world of the FŸhrer, the findings of the Warren Commission.'⁷ The strange thing is that Kidd does not devote a single word to elucidate those issues or why they should be taken to prove Trevor-Roper's quality as a historian. One can readily enough guess why Professor Kidd does nothing to explicate those issues. The fact is that in every one of those debates in which Trevor-Roper participated he ended up with little credit, and indeed in one of them suffered a complete disaster. Let us look a little more closely at those 'lively debates.'

Space considerations, however, preclude any detailed examination of the debates. The gentry affair erupted in the late 1940s and 1950s when Hugh Trevor-Roper reacted angrily to the original paper on the rise of the gentry that had been published in 1941 by R.H. Tawney. Trevor-Roper became furious with one of this own students, Lawrence Stone, who supported Tawney.⁸ With his gift for malevolent taunting Trevor-Roper all but pulverised Stone, who, however, refused to give in but toiled away with his researches and finally triumphed with his magisterial volume on The crisis of the aristocracy, 1558-1641.⁹ It is significant that in a footnote on page 212 of his article Kidd approvingly cites Trevor-Roper on the declining gentry, as given in his long paper on 'The gentry, 1540-1640,' but says nothing about Stone or his masterly Crisis of the aristocracy...