Alfred Leslie Rowse (4 December 1903 – 3 October 1997) was a British historian and writer, best known for his work on Elizabethan England and books relating to Cornwall.
Born in Cornwall and raised in modest circumstances, he was encouraged to study for Oxford by fellow-Cornishman Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He was elected a fellow of All Souls College and later appointed lecturer at Merton College. Best known of his many works was The Elizabethan Age trilogy. His work on Shakespeare included a claim to have identified the Dark Lady of the Sonnets as Emilia Lanier, which attracted much interest from scholars, but also many counterclaims. Rowse was in popular demand as a lecturer in North America.www.washingtonpost.com
In the 1930s, he stood unsuccessfully as the Labour candidate for Penryn and Falmouth, though later in life he became a Conservative.
Life and politics Rowse was born at Tregonissey, near St Austell, Cornwall, the son of Annie (née Vanson) and Richard Rowse, a china clay worker. Despite his modest origins and his parents' limited education, he won a place at St Austell County Grammar School and then a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1921. He was encouraged in his pursuit of an academic career by a fellow Cornish man of letters, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, of Polperro, who recognised his ability from an early age. Rowse endured doubting comments about his paternity, thus he paid particular attention to his mother's association with a local farmer and butcher from Polgooth, near St Austell, Frederick William May (1872–1953).Richard Ollard; A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A. L. Rowse Any such frustrations were channelled into academia, which reaped him dividends later in life.
Rowse had planned to study English literature, having developed an early love of poetry, but was persuaded to read history. He was a popular undergraduate 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 1927 Rowse was appointed lecturer at Merton College, where he stayed until 1930. He then became a lecturer at the London School of Economics. In 1929, he proceeded to a Master of Arts degree. While at Oxford, Rowse met Adam von Trott zu Solz who was attending Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Rowse became deeply infatuated with Trott, a man whom he madly loved and who influenced his thinking about Germany. Trott took Rowse on a number of tours of Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden to introduce him to German high culture.
Rowse's biographer, Richard Ollard, described Trott as "...the most longest and most intense love" of Rowse's life, a man whom he was never able to get over despite a rift that had developed between them by the late 1930s. Rowse described Trott as "six feet tall" and "well aware of his shattering beauty", but complained that he was "fundamentally heterosexual". He later stated that his relationship with Trott was "an ideal love-affair, platonic in a philosophical sense; we never exchanged a kiss, let alone an embrace. We were both extremely high-minded, perhaps too much so".
In 1931, Rowse contested the parliamentary seat of Penryn and Falmouth for the Labour Party, but was unsuccessful, finishing third behind a Liberal. In the general election of 1935 he again stood unsuccessfully, but managed to finish in second place, ahead of the Liberal. In both the 1931 and 1935 elections, Maurice Petherick was returned as a Conservative MP to Parliament, albeit with a minority of the vote. Rowse supported calls made by Sir Stafford Cripps and others for a "Popular Front". Cripps was expelled from the Labour Party for his views. In 1937, Rowse wrote in his diary: "My emotional life was engulfed in Adam, quite anguished enough in itself". By this point, Rowse and Trott were drifting apart as Trott sought to make a diplomatic career in the highly elitist Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), which offended Rowse as serving in the Auswärtiges Amt meant serving the Nazis. Moreover, Trott was a German ultra-nationalist committed to recovering all of the lands lost under the Treaty of Versailles, which led him to a certain support for Nazi foreign policy, a position that Rowse could not accept. Trott's viewpoint that he did not particularly like the Nazis, but was willing to serve them insofar as Nazi foreign policy was aimed at undoing the Treaty of Versailles was dismissed by Rowse as amoral.
Rowse worked to get agreement by Labour and Liberal parties in Devon and Cornwall, making a common cause with the Liberal MP Sir 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. That would increase his chances of winning. But, due to outbreak of war, the election did not take place and his political career was effectively ended.
Undeterred, Rowse chose to continue his career by seeking administrative positions at Oxford becoming Sub-Warden of All Souls College. In 1952, he failed in his candidacy for election as Warden against John Sparrow. Shortly afterwards he began what became regular trips to The Huntington Library in Southern California, where for many years he was a senior research fellow. He received a doctorate (DLitt) 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, Rowse was selected as a fellow of the academy (FBA) in 1958.
Rowse published about 100 books. By the mid-20th century, he was a celebrated author and much-travelled lecturer, 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. 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 strong terms.
In 1977, Rowse sparked much controversy with his book Homosexuals in History which linked creativity in the arts with being gay. Rowse wrote that his book was a study on the "predisposing conditions of creativeness, the psychological rewards of ambivalence, the doubled response to life, the sharping of perception, the tensions that led to achievement". Homosexuals in History attracted critical reviews as some of the artists identified as being gay in the book were based on only circumstantial evidence; the book had no footnotes or endnotes; his theory of a connection between artistic creativity and homosexuality was ill-defined; and his opinionated writing style full of arch comments alienated many. The American scholar Richard Aldrich wrote that for its flaws Homosexuals in History was one of the first serious studies in gay history and that many of the artists whom Rowse "outed" in his book were indeed gay, which marked the first time that this aspects of their lives was discussed in a mainstream book.
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 lifelong themes in his books and articles was his condemnation of the Conservative-dominated National Government's policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and the economic and political consequences for Great Britain of fighting a Second World War with Germany. He also criticised his former Labour Party colleagues–including George Lansbury, Kingsley Martin and Richard Crossman—for endorsing appeasement, writing "not one of the Left intellectuals could republish what they wrote in the Thirties without revealing what idiotic judgments they made about events."Bouverie, Tim (2019). Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War (1 ed.). New York: Tim Duggan Books. p. 111. 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".
Despite international academic success, Rowse 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 in 1996. He died at home on 3 October 1997. His ashes are buried in the Campdowns Cemetery, Charlestown near St Austell.
Elizabethan and Shakespearean scholarship 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 William 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 Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton.
Rowse's "discoveries" about Shakespeare's sonnets amount to the following:
The Fair Youth was the 19-year-old Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, extremely handsome and bisexual. The sonnets were written 1592–1594/5. The "rival poet" was Christopher Marlowe. The "Dark Lady" was Emilia Lanier. His use of the diaries of Simon Forman, which contained material about her, influenced other scholars. Christopher Marlowe's death is recorded in the sonnets. Shakespeare was a heterosexual man, who was faced with an unusual situation when the handsome, young, bisexual Earl of Southampton fell in love with him.
Rowse was dismissive of those who rejected his views. He supported his conclusions. In the case of Shakespeare's sexuality, he emphasised the playwright's heterosexual inclinations by noting that he had impregnated an older woman by the time he was 18, and was consequently obliged to marry her. Moreover, he fathered 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 Rowse believes he was having an extramarital affair.
Personal attitudes
The diary excerpts published in 2003 reveal that "he was an overt even rather proud homosexual in a pre-Wolfenden age, fascinated by young policemen and sailors, obsessively speculating on the sexual proclivities of everyone he meets". Much later, following retirement, he said, "of course, I used to be a homo; but now, when it doesn't matter, if anything I'm a hetero".
He was aware of his own intelligence from earliest childhood, and obsessed that others either did not accept this fact, or not quickly enough. The diaries describe what he said were "a series of often inane jealousies".