Brian Wormald; historian of 17th-century thought
Hyfler/Rosner
08 April 2005
Brian Wormald was a distinguished historian of 17th-century
thought - the author of a superb book on Clarendon - and for
nearly 70 years a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
In later life he expressed nothing but pride in his family
background which lay, so he suggested, amongst the vanished
world of the clerical squirearchy, his father having
presented himself as rector of the parish church of
Solihull, then a rich and semi-rural living. Brian Wormald
was schooled at Harrow before winning a scholarship to
Peterhouse in 1931.
What he did not willingly disclose was that this seemingly
idyllic boyhood was overshadowed by debt and the traumas of
the First World War, his father, who had served as an army
chaplain in the trenches, having returned to England
shattered by his experience of administering the last rites.
Until the age of 10, Wormald could neither read nor write,
and only acquired these skills through the intervention of
the local postmistress. Money problems forced his removal
from Harrow, and it was only through his own persistence and
in dire necessity that he won his scholarship to Cambridge.
There, under the influence of his tutor, Paul Vellacott -
Headmaster of Harrow (1934-39), Master of Peterhouse
(1939-54) and a man, like Wormald's father, deeply scarred
by his experience of the Great War - Wormald took a double
First in History and in 1938 was elected to a fellowship at
Peterhouse after a brief period as Research Fellow of St
John's.
Vellacott's insistence on the sartorial proprieties and his
patrician determination to épater les bourgeois were both
prejudices adopted by the young Wormald, whose extensive,
though latterly uniquely dilapidated, wardrobe ran to
silver-buckled shoes and a monocle, and whose loathing of
pedantry, teetotalism and the creeping spread of
lower-middle-class values could be expressed in the most
forthright of Anglo-Saxon terms.
As with so many aspects of Wormald's life, however, there
was more than a hint of self-parody to this somewhat
alarming exterior, beneath which there lurked great warmth
of heart and a deep if troubled spirituality marked by a
combination of passionate faith in the omnipotence of God
and a no less passionate uncertainty that God remains
charitably disposed towards mankind.
As early as the 1930s Wormald sought Roman Catholic
instruction and, although his plunge towards Rome was to be
delayed for 20 years during which he was ordained as an
Anglican priest and served as Dean and Chaplain of
Peterhouse, when he plunged he did so with a vengeance. In
1955, inspired, so it is said, by Pope Pius XII's doctrinal
declaration on the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary - a
declaration which by the more faint-hearted was regarded as
a positive disincentive to conversion - he put aside his
Anglican orders to become the most devout, though still the
most troubled, of lay Catholics. It is no coincidence that
on his reception into the Catholic Church he adopted the
baptismal name Thomas, chosen in honour of the patron saint
of all doubters.
To the very end he maintained daily devotions, in which the
Mass, prayer and regular confession ranked higher even than
his fondness for whisky and well-bred women. He also loved
Ireland and the Irish (despite admiring Oliver Cromwell),
and took delight in children, foreign travel, and swimming
in the remoter reaches of the Cam.
At Peterhouse Wormald formed part of a brilliant history
side that by the 1950s included no less than four of the
professors in the Cambridge faculty, led by Herbert
Butterfield, punctuator of all certitudes, whose fluency of
expression left Wormald awed though never entirely
convinced. Deploying a tutorial method described by one
former pupil as "supervision by angst", Wormald was a highly
regarded, though in his own opinion a much-overworked,
teacher.
His colleagues formed a caucus of reaction in Cambridge and
in many cases obtained recognition on the national stage.
Wormald was constrained here by an approach to writing in
which a 17th-century prose style was matched to the most
serious and soul-searching of intellectual enquiry. His book
on Clarendon, Clarendon: politics, history & religion,
1640-1660, written before the Second World War but not
published until 1951, was followed by a great silence during
which his study of Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon: history,
politics and science, 1561-1626 (1993), was only slowly and
painfully brought to birth.
Bacon indeed would never have been published had it not been
for a minor illness during which the publishers were able to
liberate the typescript from the superhumanly patient
college secretary to whom for the past decade Wormald had
delivered dictation.
Hugh Trevor-Roper characterised Wormald's Clarendon as "a
good book written backwards". In reality, the book will
outlast many more fashionable monographs, chiefly through
its exploration of the ways in which Clarendon's
intellectual convictions were posited upon considerable
self-doubts: a theme very close to Wormald's heart.
Having held virtually every college office, including that
of Senior Tutor from 1956 to 1962, Wormald was disappointed
not to succeed Butterfield as Master of Peterhouse, but in
truth his cause was not aided by his own ability to match
bluntness of expression to uncertainty of purpose, nor by a
conviction for driving under the influence. His motoring,
although it enabled him to bring comfort and not a little
confusion to his many female admirers, came more and more to
resemble that of the famous Mr Toad.
In retirement he lived in self-imposed squalor, on a diet of
fried bacon and bananas. He smoked and drank into his late
eighties, yet he outlived virtually all of his
contemporaries, chiefly, one suspects, because although
destined for heaven he had so firm a belief in the existence
of hell.
His surname, but nothing of his personality, was used by
Graham Greene for the principal character in Our Man in
Havana (1958), Wormald and Greene having been rivals at one
time for the affections of the clerically fixated Lady
Walston.
Wormald's marriage to Rosemary Lloyd, a much younger woman -
who herself had taken a double First in Classics - ended in
separation, although he and his wife continued to speak
regularly on the telephone, and elected to have their ashes
interred together. They produced four brilliant sons, three
of whom won King's scholarships to Eton. The death of two of
these sons, including that of the medieval historian Patrick
Wormald in 2004, was a tragedy from which he never fully
recovered.
In his last years he was sustained by the love of his
youngest son, himself a distinguished eye surgeon, by the
admiration and affection of his many friends and, at the
very end, when he was reluctantly persuaded to give up his
college house, by the patient devotion of the sisters of the
Hope Nursing Home in Cambridge. He will be remembered as a
fine scholar and a deeply lovable man whose sins were never
as scarlet as he himself was inclined to paint them.
Nicholas Vincent
Brian Harvey Goodwin Wormald, historian: born 24 July 1912;
Fellow, Peterhouse, Cambridge 1938-79 (Emeritus), Dean
1941-44, Tutor and Senior Tutor 1952-62, Senior Fellow
1968-79; ordained deacon 1940, priest 1943; University
Lecturer in History, Cambridge University 1948-79; married
1946 Rosemary Lloyd (died 2003; two sons, and two sons
deceased); died Cambridge 22 March 2005.