The Passionate Historian - A Conversation with John Elliott

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771700450
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and John Elliott, Regius Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford and Trinity College, Cambridge. This extensive conversation provides behind-the-scenes insights into how an undergraduate encounter with a 17th-century painting of The Count-Duke Olivares led John Elliott on a lifelong odyssey to study the history of Spain, Europe and the Americas in the early modern period to become one of the greatest Spanish historians of our age. This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, Two Cheers for Objectivity, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. Beginnings - The benefits of travelII. In Search of Objectivity - Sentimental dangersIII. Past and Present - How to revivify yourselfIV. Circumventing Obstacles - The benefits of pressing onV. Doing History - Comparing, connecting and writing wellVI. The Power of Imagination - Surprise tests and non-barking dogsVII. Decline - What it means, exactlyVIII. The Impact of Technology - Strengths and weaknessesIX. Going Global - Opportunities and challengesX. History's Due - Beyond the theme parkAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations Series: This book is part of an expanding series of 100+ Ideas Roadshow conversations, each one presenting a wealth of candid insights from a leading expert in a focused yet informal setting to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldn't otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks. For other books in this series visit our website: https://ideasroadshow.com/.

The Conversation

I. Beginnings

The benefits of travel

HB: So let me begin by asking the obvious question that you address straight away in your book, History in the Making: why Spain?

You mentioned that your interest in Spain began in an accidental way when you first encountered the country on an undergraduate summer road trip.

I’d like you to expand on that a bit while keeping one question in mind, which is, did you choose Spain or did Spain choose you?

JE: I think on the whole it’s fair to say that Spain chose me. I went to Spain for the first time in the summer of 1950, a long vacation from Cambridge, my first long vacation as a Cambridge undergraduate. I’d seen an advertisement in the university newspaper, Varsity, which said that there was this old army truck that was going to Spain with a group of people and that there were one or two places still available.

So I decided to sign up. And we went off in July for a six week trip right round the Iberian Peninsula. Like others in the group, I think, I was overwhelmed by this country that was totally new to me. I’d been brought up during the war and hadn’t traveled abroad. To see this fantastic country with the parched landscape of Castile in the middle of the very hot summer, to go round and see these extraordinary cities like Toledo and Segovia and Salamanca, which are incredibly beautiful, and then to go to the Prado museum and be overwhelmed, particularly by the paintings by Velázquez (I’m very interested in paintings, I’ve always had a response to art, I suppose)—all those things particularly gripped me.

Then when I came back to Cambridge, where I was reading European and British history, I became very interested in following up one of the portraits by Velázquez in the Prado: the fantastic equestrian portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares.

Olivares was the first minister and the favourite of Philip IV from 1621 until he fell from power in 1643. Those were the last 20 years of Spain’s greatness as the dominant power in the Europe of the 16th and early 17th centuries.

I thought that I’d like to know more about this man, but I found really very little and rather conventional stuff about him in the textbooks on European history. So I thought to myself, If I ever become a professional historian of European history—I had no knowledge of whether I was going to be or not at that stage—then I’d like to know more about this man and his policies.

That’s really how it all started: I was gripped both by a country and an individual.

HB: I see. But I’d like to go back to this trip for just a moment. Here you are, you’re an undergraduate, you just finished your first year and there’s this opportunity to go bombing around the Iberian Peninsula in an army truck. What’s that all about? I mean, I don’t remember such opportunities when I was an undergraduate. Were you supposed to be doing anything? Or were you just—

JE: No. This was our vacation.

HB: So who was driving the truck?

JE: Another undergraduate.

HB: And how many of you were there?

JE: There must have been ten or eleven.

HB: All of this brings me back to this question of Why Spain?

So here you are, an undergraduate student, and you think, “Oh, Spain is an interesting place” because you’ve had this eye-opening experience touring the Iberian Peninsula in a truck over a summer. Was it then that you first saw this portrait of the Count-Duke Olivares?

JE: I saw it for the first time on that trip, yes, because of course I was looking at all the Velázquez in the Prado. But whether it really seized me at that moment particularly, I’m not sure. I think it probably did, but you know, I sort of buried it somewhere and then came back to it later on.

HB: You also talked about how you were tempted to specialize in British history towards the end of your studies, but you recognized that there were tactical reasons for not doing so: the landscape was very crowded in British history and it was relatively wide-open for Spain. But nonetheless, I could imagine that you might have developed an interest in Spain resulting from this trip, but then eventually drift off into something quite different: medieval history, Renaissance history, Italian history, whatever.

But that’s not what happened, which is really at the heart of my question of whether you just happened to encounter Spain serendipitously through this one occasion, or whether, in fact, there was and is a particular resonance you felt with the culture, the attitudes, the people.

In History in the Making, you refer to personal parallels: you talk about some similarities of countries in decline between 1640s Spain and what you were living through in post-war Britain.

In short, was there a real deep connection to Spain that you think was waiting to be explored? In other words, might it be that even had you not gone on this particular trip you would have eventually wound up as a Spanish historian anyway? Or was it just one of these things where had you taken a trip to Italy at the time—or to Venezuela or to Japan—your career might well have gone off in a completely different direction. Obviously you can’t answer this question perfectly accurately, but what do you think?

JE: All these elements you’ve mentioned come into play, and came into play: I did go to Italy the following year; and although I was enormously impressed by Italian Renaissance buildings and paintings, it didn’t for some reason have the same impact on me as Spain. I don’t know: had I been to Italy first, it’s conceivable, I suppose, that it might have been the other way round. So many Italian specialists don’t react to Spain. They feel it’s inferior in some way.

So there’s a possibility there was chance in all that, but it may be that there was something of the austerity of the country that gripped me. I suppose that I’m naturally a fairly austere person in some ways, in my tastes and so forth. I think that set me off.

And then the fact that this was a country that was just emerging from the Civil War. It was desperately impoverished, a very repressive regime, a country that British historians were refusing to visit—those who had lived through, and remembered, the Spanish Civil War—so that, in a sense, it was an open field.

I was always particularly attracted by the early Modern period, the 16th and 17th centuries of European history. I think that all those elements combined and suggested: here’s a wonderful field, it’s not being worked on much by Anglo-American historians. And as I found out later, it wasn’t being seriously worked on by many Spanish historians either because they simply didn’t have the opportunity to work in the archives. They were desperately cash-strapped and most of them didn’t have time for research, although there were a handful of very good historians in Spain working under very difficult circumstances.

In a sense I was enormously privileged. As soon as I started my research I found I had a field open to myself, on a century that had been neglected by Spanish historians because it was traditionally seen as a century of decline after the great age of Charles V and Philip II. Philip II died in 1598 and then it seemed to be downhill all the way.

I thought, There must be something here, especially with all the brilliance of Spanish civilization of that period: the great painters like Velázquez, Zurbarán and so on, and the marvellous literature.

It was thus a very rich field, potentially, both for somebody interested in what happens when a great power appears to reach its peak and then to start going downhill, and the conjunction of that with an enormous artistic efflorescence at a ...