C. V. Wedgwood

Dame Veronica Wedgwood OMDBEFBAFRHistS
Wedgwood in 1969, byGodfrey Argent
Born	Cicely Veronica Wedgwood (1910-07-20)20 July 1910 Stocksfield,England
Died	9 March 1997(1997-03-09)(aged 86) London, England
Occupation	Historian
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
Period	1935–1987
Subject	17th century Europe
Notable works	The Thirty Years War(1938)
Partner	Jacqueline Hope-Wallace
Relatives	Sir Ralph Wedgwood(father) Iris Wedgwood(mother) John Hamilton Wedgwood(brother)

Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood,OM,DBE,FBA,FRHistS(20 July 1910 – 9 March 1997) was an English historian who published under the nameC. V. Wedgwood.Specializing in the history of 17th-century England and continental Europe, her biographies and narrative histories are said to have provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works.

Early life

Wedgwood was born inStocksfield,Northumberland,on 20 July 1910. She was the only daughter ofSir Ralph Wedgwood, Bt,a railway executive, and his wifeIris Wedgwood(néePawson), a novelist and travel writer. Her brother was the politician and industrialist SirJohn Wedgwood.Veronica Wedgwood was a great-great-great-granddaughter of the potter and abolitionistJosiah Wedgwood.Her uncle was the politicianJosiah Wedgwood,later 1st Baron Wedgwood.

She was educated at home, and then atNorland Place School.She earned aFirstin Classics and Modern History atLady Margaret Hall, Oxford,whereA. L. Rowsesaid she was "my first outstanding pupil".In 1932, she enrolled for a PhD at theLondon School of Economicsunder the supervision ofR. H. Tawney,but never completed it.

Career

Wedgwood published her first biography,Strafford,at the age of 25 andThe Thirty Years War,"her big book... covering a large canvas", according to Rowse, just three years later,a workPatrick Leigh Fermorcalled "[b]y far the best and most exciting book on the whole period".

She specialised in European history of the 16th and 17th centuries. Her work in continental European history included the major studyThe Thirty Years War(1938) and biographies ofWilliam the SilentandCardinal Richelieu.She devoted the greater part of her research to English history, especially in theEnglish Civil War.Her major works included a biography ofOliver Cromwelland two volumes of a planned trilogy,The Great Rebellion,which includedThe King's Peace(1955) andThe King's War(1958). She continued the story withThe Trial of Charles I(1964). She was known to walk battlefields and experience the same weather and field conditions as the subjects of her histories, mindful that Cromwell had no military experience and most participants in the English Civil War were "talented amateurs" when it came to military manoeuvres.The subject was one of great controversy and rival schools of historical interpretations, but she held herself apart, "probably put off by the sheer scholasticism into which the treatment of the subject had degenerated, the rudeness with which academics treated each other over it, when she herself was always courteous and lady-like." Instead, "what was remarkable about Wedgwood's view of the Civil War was the way in which she depicted the sheer confusion of it all, the impossibility of co-ordinating events in three countries, once order from the centre had broken down".

OfWilliam the Silent(1944), Rowse wrote that she "displayed not only a mastery of research but maturity of judgement, with a literary capacity not common in academic writing. She wrote indeed to be read, and not surprisingly the book began for her a long procession of prizes and honours..."The New York Timessingled it out as a landmark: "Miracles do happen. A generation ago the young English woman historian was often tethered to a dry theme until she had nibbled it bald. Today she dares much more to select a major subject", and praised her scholarship for balancing complex details with human drama: "Miss Wedgwood has not faltered before the intricacy or magnitude of this checkered struggle, and hers is a glowing, substantial, ingeniously organized book."

Thirty years after she published a biography ofThomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford,she published a much-revised version that was considerably more critical of her subject. In the earlier version she called him a "sincere, brave and able man". After using a collection of his family's papers that had not previously been available, she deemed him greedy and unscrupulous.

She was well regarded in academic circles and her books were widely read. She was also successful as a lecturer and broadcaster. In 1953 the BBC invited her to present her impressions of thecoronation of Queen Elizabeth II.She was a tutor atSomerville College, Oxford,and she was a Special Lecturer atUniversity College Londonfrom 1962 to 1991.According toThe Economist,she "had a novelist's talent for entering into the character of the giants of history." She published using her initialsC.V.as a nom de plume to disguise her gender, aware of prejudice against women as serious historians.She wrote as well about the historian's responsibility to do more than analyse or describe. Rather than pose as a disinterested observer, she wrote: "Historians should always draw morals."She offered her own alternative to the neatness provided by theory: "[T]he whole value of the study of history is for me its delightful undermining of certainty, its cumulative insistence of the differences of point of view... it is not lack of prejudice which makes for dull history, but lack of passion."

George Steiner,complaining that "[m]uch of what passes for history at present is scarcely literate", set Wedgwood apart:

One of the few contemporary historians prepared to defend openly the poetic nature of all historical imagining is C. V. Wedgwood. She fully concedes that all style brings with it the possibility of distortion: "There is no literary style which may not at some point take away something from the ascertainable outline of truth, which it is the task of scholarship to excavate and re-establish."

She acknowledged that contemporary concerns affected her historical assessments. In the 1957 introduction to a new release ofThe Thirty Years War,which first appeared in 1938, she wrote: "I wrote this book in the thirties, against the background of depression at home and mounting tension abroad. The preoccupations of that unhappy time cast their shadows over its pages."She replied to critics of her attention to biography and the role of the individual in history:

The individual—stupendous and beautiful paradox—is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.... I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an inhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.

Her biographies and narrative histories are said to have "provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works".

By 1966 her reputation and notoriety were sufficient to allow the authors of a study ofThe Nature of Narrativeto invoke her name in reference to the tradition of historical scholarship: "... medieval traditional poetic narratives contained allusions to verifiable historical events [although] their history was not such as Tacitus, Bede, or C. V. Wedgwood might have written."

In 1946 she translatedElias Canetti'sDie Blendung,asAuto-da-Fé,under the author's supervision, though a modern scholar who considers Wedgwood's work on it "ordinarily quite excellent" doubts Canetti reviewed it in detail. He suspects she hesitated to present discussions of misogyny and antisemitism quite openly.

Her bookThe Last of the Radicals(1951), was about her uncleJosiah Wedgwood, 1st Baron Wedgwood.She completed just one volume of her plannedShort History of the World(1985) before illness prevented her from continuing the project.

Her essays, many later published in small collections, appeared originally inLady Rhondda'sTime and Tidewhere she held editor posts from 1944 to 1952, and in theTimes Literary Supplement,The Spectator,and other periodicals.Garrett Mattinglypraised the essays inTruth and Opinion(1960) for "displaying (or concealing, rather, but always molded and controlled by) that exquisite sense of form, in a medium apparently almost formless, which is the first-rate essayist's most precious gift."

Personal life

She was active in numerous societies, including the London arm of theInternational Pen Clubin London, where she was president from 1951 to 1957, as well as theSociety of Authors(president, 1972–1977) and theLondon Library.She was appointed as the non-legal member on the Judicial Committee advising Home Secretary on deprivation of citizenship in 1948.She served on theArts Councilfrom 1958 to 1961 and the Advisory Council of theVictoria and Albert Museumfrom 1960 to 1969, and was twice a trustee of theNational Gallery(1962–1968 and 1969–1976), and its first female trustee. She was a member of theRoyal Commission on Historical Manuscriptsfrom 1953 to 1978 and president of theEnglish Associationfor 1955–56. She was elected a Fellow of theBritish Academyin 1975.

In 1947 she attended the first meeting of theMont Pelerin Society.In 1966 she was one of 49 writers who signed a letter appealing to theSoviet Unionfor the release ofAndrei SinyavskyandYuli Danielfrom imprisonment based on the "literary and artistic merits" of their work and rejecting the characterisation of it as "propaganda".In her later years she was an admirer ofMargaret Thatcher.

Wedgwood's grave atAlcistonChurch inEast Sussex

In her last years she suffered fromAlzheimer's disease.She died on 9 March 1997 atSt Thomas' Hospitalin London.She was a lesbian: her partner of almost 70 years, Jacqueline Hope-Wallace (died 2011), who had a career in the British civil service, survived her.Wedgwood and Hope-Wallace together owned a country house nearPolegatein Sussex.Both came from musical families. Wedgwood's father was a cousin ofRalph Vaughan Williamsand the dedicatee of hisLondon Symphony.Hope-Wallace's brotherPhilipwas for various periods music and drama critic ofThe Times,Time and Tide,and theManchester Guardian.She edited a collection of his writings asWords and Music(1981) for which Wedgwood wrote the introduction.In 1997, Hope-Wallace donated a 1944 oil portrait of Wedgwood by SirLawrence Gowingto theNational Portrait Gallery, London.

Honours

Her biographyWilliam the Silentwas awarded the 1944James Tait Black Memorial Prize.The Netherlands awarded her theOrder of Orange-Nassau.

She received honorary degrees from the universities ofGlasgowandSheffieldand fromSmith College,and was a member of theInstitute for Advanced StudyinPrincetonfrom 1952 to 1966.She was elected an honorary fellow of her Oxford college, Lady Margaret Hall.In the United States she was elected a member of theAcademy of Arts and Letters(1966), a Foreign Honorary Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences(1973),and theAmerican Philosophical Society.She received theGoethe Medalin 1958.

She was appointed aCBEin 1956, anDBEin 1968, and in 1969, not yet sixty, became the third woman to be appointed a member of theOrder of Merit.She termed the last of these honours "excessive".

Writings

• Strafford, 1593–1641(1935; revised edition:Thomas Wentworth, First Earl of Strafford, 1593–1641: A Revaluation(1961))
• The Thirty Years War(1938; new edition 1957; with updated bibliography, 1961)
• Oliver Cromwell(1939; revised 1973)
• William the Silent:William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, 1533–1584.New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1944
• Velvet Studies(1946), a collection of essays
• Richelieu and the French Monarchy(1949), "Teach Yourself History" series
• Seventeenth-Century English Literature(1950; 2nd edition 1970)
• The Last of the Radicals:Josiah Wedgwood,M.P.(1951)
• The Great Rebellion(two of three volumes completed)
  • The King's Peace, 1637–1641(1955)
  • The King's War, 1641–1647(1958)
• The Trial of Charles I(1964; also published asA Coffin for King Charlesand later asA King Condemned: The Trial and Execution of Charles I(Taurus Parke Paperbacks: London, 2011))
• Poetry and Politics Under the Stuarts(1960), originally Cambridge lectures
• Truth and Opinion(1960), a collection of essays
• "Introduction" toRose Macaulay,They Were Defeated(London: Collins, 1960); reprint of 1932 edition of the historical novel
• Montrose(1966)
• The Sense of the Past: Thirteen Studies in the Theory and Practice of History(Collier Books, 1967)
• The World of Rubens(Time-Life Books, 1973)
• The Spoils of Time: A Short History of the World, Vol. 1: A World History From the Dawn of Civilization Through the Early Renaissance(1985)
• History and Hope: The Collected Essays of C.V. Wedgwood(1987); "Most of these essays were originally published in two collections—Velvet studiesin 1946 andTruth and opinionin 1960—although the present volume contains a few later pieces "

Translations

• Carl Brandi,The Emperor Charles V: The Growth and Destiny of a Man and of a World-Empire(In German Brandi, Karl. 1937.Kaiser Karl V: Werden und Schicksal einer Persönlichkeit und eines Weltreiches.München: Bruckmann)
• Canetti, Elias,Auto-da-Fé(British ed., 1946);The Tower of Babel(American ed., 1947); original in German:Die Blendung