Alfred Leslie Rowse, CH, FBA (4 December 1903 – 3 October 1997), known professionally as A. L. Rowse and to friends and family as Leslie, was a British historian from Cornwall. He is perhaps best known for his work on Elizabethan England and his poetry about Cornwall. He was also a Shakespearean scholar and biographer. He developed a widespread reputation for irascibility and intellectual arrogance.
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In 1931, he contested the parliamentary seat of Penryn and Falmouth for the Labour Party, but was unsuccessful, finishing third behind the Liberals. In the general election of 1935 he again proved unsuccessful, however, managed to finish ahead of the Liberal in second place. In both the 1931 and 1935 elections, the Conservative had won with a minority of the vote. He became a supporter of calls made by the likes of Sir Stafford Cripps for a 'Popular Front' whereby Labour and Liberals should unite at election time to defeat the National Government. While Cripps was expelled for his views, Rowse worked on getting 'local arrangements' agreed by Labour and Liberal parties in Devon and Cornwall, making a common cause with the Liberal MP Richard Acland. A general election was expected to take place in 1939, and Rowse, who was again Labour's candidate for Penryn & Falmouth, was not expected to have a Liberal opponent which would make his chances of winning much greater. However, due to outbreak of war, the election did not take place. This was in effect the end of his political career.
Rowse was born in Tregonissey near St Austell, Cornwall, the son of Richard Rowse, a china clayworker, and Annie (née Vanson). His parents were poor and semi-illiterate but despite his origins, he won a place at St. Austell Grammar School (now Poltair School - who have named part of their curriculum the Rowse Pathway) and then a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford in 1921. He was encouraged in his pursuit of an academic career by fellow Cornish man of letters, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who lived at Polperro and who recognised his ability from an early age. Rowse had doubts about his paternity and paid particular attention to his mother's association with a local farmer and butcher from Polgooth, near St. Austell, Frederick William May (1872–1953).[1]
Rowse had planned to study English literature, having developed an early love of poetry, but was persuaded to read history. He was a popular under-graduate and made many friendships that lasted for life. He graduated with first class honours in 1925 and was elected a Fellow of All Souls College the same year. In 1929, he was awarded his Master of Arts degree, and in 1927 was appointed lecturer at Merton College, where he stayed until 1930. He became a lecturer at the London School of Economics.
He chose to continue his career at Oxford becoming Sub-Warden of All Souls College. In 1952, he failed in his candidacy for election as Warden against John Sparrow and shortly afterwards began his regular trips to The Huntington Library in California where for many years he was a Senior Research Fellow. He received a doctorate from Oxford University in 1953. After delivering the British Academy's 1957 Raleigh Lecture on History about Sir Richard Grenville's place in English history he became a Fellow of the Academy in 1958. Despite his academic and social success, he remained proud of his Cornish roots. He retired from Oxford in 1973 to Trenarren House, his Cornish home, from where he remained active as writer, reviewer and conversationalist until immobilised by a stroke the year before his death. His ashes are buried in the Campdowns Cemetery, Charlestown near St Austell. There is a commemorative plaque to him in Truro Cathedral and a memorial stone on Black Head, overlooking St Austell Bay almost within sight of Trenarren.
Rowse published around 100 books. He became a celebrated author and lecturer from the 1940s and travelled widely, especially in the United States. He also published many popular articles in newspapers and magazines in Great Britain and the United States. His brilliance was widely recognised, and his knack for the sensational, as well as his academic boldness (which some considered to be irresponsible carelessness), sustained his reputation. His opinions on rival popular historians, such as Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J.P. Taylor, were expressed sometimes in very ripe terms.
In his later years, Rowse moved increasingly towards the political right, and many considered him to be part of the Tory tradition by the time he died. One of Rowse's life-long themes in his books and articles was his condemnation of the National Government's policy of appeasement in the 1930s and the economic and political consequences for Great Britain of fighting a second war with Germany. Another was his horror at the degradation of standards in modern society. He is reported as saying : "This filthy twentieth century. I hate its guts".
One of Rowse's great enthusiasms was collecting books, and he owned many first editions, many of them bearing his acerbic annotations. For example, his copy of the January 1924 edition of The Adelphi magazine edited by John Middleton Murry bears a pencilled note after Murry's poem In Memory of Katherine Mansfield: 'Sentimental gush on the part of JMM. And a bad poem. A.L.R.'
Upon his death in 1997 he bequeathed his book collection to the University of Exeter, and his personal archive of manuscripts, diaries, and correspondence. In 1998 the University Librarian selected about sixty books from Rowse’s own working library and a complete set of his published books. The Royal Institution of Cornwall selected some of the remaining books, and the rest were sold to dealers.
Rowse wrote poetry all his life. He contributed poems to Public School Verse whilst at St Austell Grammar School. He also had verse published in Oxford 1923, Oxford 1924, and Oxford 1925. His collected poems A Life were published in 1981. The poetry is mainly autobiographical, descriptive of place (especially Cornwall) and people he knew and cared for, e.g. The Progress of Love, which describes his platonic love for Adam von Trott, a handsome and aristocratic German youth who studied at Oxford in the 1930s and who was later executed for his part in the July Plot of 1944 to kill Hitler. Unusually for a British poet, Rowse wrote a great number of poems inspired by American scenery. He maintained that in writing poetry one could get to the truth of a matter rather more than in prose.
His first book was On History, a Study of Present Tendencies published in 1927 as the seventh volume of Kegan Paul's Psyche Miniature General Series. In 1931 he contributed to T. S. Eliot's quarterly review The Criterion. In 1935 he co-edited Charles Henderson's Essays in Cornish History for the Clarendon Press. His best-seller was his first volume of autobiography A Cornish Childhood, first published by Jonathan Cape in 1942, that has gone on to sell nearly half a million copies worldwide. It describes his hard struggle to get to the University of Oxford and his love/hate relationship with Cornwall. Highly readable, it contains some of his best prose.
Rowse's early works focus on 16th-century England and his first full-length historical monograph, Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge (1937), was a biography of a 16th-century sailor. His next was Tudor Cornwall (1941), a lively detailed account of Cornish society in the 16th century. He consolidated his reputation with a one-volume general history of England, The Spirit of English History (1943), but his most important work was the historical trilogy The Elizabethan Age: The England of Elizabeth (1950), The Expansion of Elizabethan England (1955), and The Elizabethan Renaissance (1971–72), respectively examine the society, overseas exploration, and culture of late 16th-century England.
In 1963 Rowse began to concentrate on Shakespeare, starting with a biography in which he claimed to have dated all the sonnets, identified Christopher Marlowe as the suitor's rival and solved all but one of the other problems posed by the sonnets. His failure to acknowledge his reliance upon the work of other scholars alienated some of his peers, but he won popular acclaim. In 1973 he published Shakespeare the Man, in which he claimed to have solved the final problem - the identity of the 'Dark Lady': from a close reading of the sonnets and the diaries of Simon Forman, he asserted that she must have been Emilia Lanier, whose poems he would later collect. He suggested that Shakespeare had been influenced by the feud between the Danvers and Long families in Wiltshire, when he wrote Romeo and Juliet. The Danverses were friends of the 3rd Earl of Southampton.
Rowse's "discoveries" about Shakespeare's sonnets amount to the following:
Rowse was dismissive of those who rejected his views, but he did not make such assertions without supplying reasons. In the case of Shakespeare, he emphasised heterosexual inclinations by noting that Shakespeare had managed to get an older woman pregnant by the time he was 18, and was consequently obliged to marry her. Moreover, he had saddled himself with three children by the time he was 21. In the sonnets, Shakespeare's explicit erotic interest lies with the Dark Lady; he obsesses about her. Shakespeare was still married and therefore carrying on an extramarital affair.
Rowse, who was openly gay, also wrote on the subject of human sexuality in his controversial book Homosexuals In History (1977).[2]
He wrote other biographies of English historical and literary figures, and many other historical works. Among his biographies are ones of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Southampton, the major players in the sonnets. A devoted cat-lover, he also wrote the biographies of several cats who came to live with him at Trenarren, claiming that it was as much a challenge to write the biography of a favourite cat as it was a Queen of England. He also published a number of short stories, mainly about Cornwall, of interest more for their thinly veiled autobiographical resonances than their literary merit. His last book, My View of Shakespeare, published in 1996, summed up his life-time's appreciation of The Bard of Stratford. The book was dedicated "To HRH the Prince of Wales in common devotion to William Shakespeare".
Rowse was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded an Honorary D.Litt by the University of Exeter in 1960 and a D.C.L. by the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada, the same year. He was elected to the Athenaeum under Rule II in 1972, received the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982 and was made a Companion of Honour (somewhat belatedly) in the 1997 New Years' Honours List. In 1968 he was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow, taking the bardic name Lef A Gernow ('Voice of Cornwall'), reflecting his high standing in the Cornish community. He did not receive the Order of Merit that he once coveted or a knighthood that many thought he deserved.
Rowse was a hoarder and boasted that his unpublished diaries, journals, letters and pocket books would keep a Rowse industry going long after his death, in the manner of Boswell or Horace Walpole. The full force of this industry has taken time to get up steam: extracts chosen from his diaries for posthumous publication in 2003 proved disappointing, as it appeared that most of the more interesting material had already been quarried by Rowse himself for publication in his lifetime and the remainder seemed somewhat banal. It remains to be seen whether there is scope for a more lively (and possibly controversial) edition of diary extracts. A collected edition of Rowse's many letters has yet to be undertaken. Meanwhile, his posthumous academic reputation is on the rise. In books such as Tudor Cornwall and The Expansion of Elizabethan England he can be seen as a pioneer of the new British historiography that recognises the cultural differences of the constituent parts of the British Isles. Several of his best books remain in print or have been reprinted, and various authors have attempted analysis of his notoriously complex personality - see Biography below.
As well as his own appearances on radio and television, Rowse has been depicted in various TV drama documentaries about British politics in the 1930s and appeasement.
Christopher William Hill's radio play Accolades, re-broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2007 as a tribute to its star, Ian Richardson, who had died the previous month, covers the period leading up to the publication of Shakespeare the Man in 1973 and publicity surrounding Rowse's unshakable confidence that he had discovered the identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. It was broadcast yet again on 9 July 2008.
A Cornish Childhood has also been adapted for voices (in the style of Under Milk Wood) by Judith Cook.
Mentioned in the parody "Diary by Isaiah Berlin" as told to Craig Brown, Private Eye no 1239, 9 July 2009, in which Rowse plans a dinner for Princess Margaret at All Souls College.