1. Geyl and Britain: an introduction

Ulrich Tiedau and Stijn van Rossem

Pieter Catharinus Arie Geyl (15 December 1887–31 December 1966) was arguably one of the most internationally known historians to come from the Netherlands in the twentieth century, and one of the most controversial at that. Having originally arrived in the UK as a journalist, he started his academic career at the University of London in the aftermath of the First World War, with the first endowed chair for Dutch studies in the anglophone world (1919), a remit that five years later was changed to Dutch history and institutions (1924). Known during this time for his reinterpretation of the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt against the Habsburgs, which challenged existing national historiographies of both Belgium and the Netherlands but was also closely linked with his political activism in favour of the Flemish movement in Belgium and the ‘Greater Netherlands’ ideology,1 as well as for his questioning of the dominant monarchist tradition in Dutch historiography,2 Geyl left his stamp on the British perception of Low Countries history and that of the anglophone world at large before leaving the British capital in 1935 after more than two decades to accept a chair in his home country, at Utrecht University.

Arrested during the German occupation of the Netherlands after a series of lectures on Napoleon at the Rotterdam School of Economics in September 1940, in which Geyl had drawn too obvious parallels to a more contemporary dictator, eliciting ‘occasional bursts of laughter’3 from the audience, he was held for four years, initially at Buchenwald and then at Haaren and St Michielsgestel in North-Brabant. During this time, he not only conceptualized his major historiographical study of Bonaparte, but also authored a collection of poems, a detective novel and an extensive pre-war autobiography (in Dutch) covering his period in London (1913–35) in full; the latter was posthumously edited and published in 2007 to much acclaim by three of the contributors to this volume (Van Hees, Berkelaar, Dorsman).4 After his release on health grounds in 1944, he wrote for the underground press and supported the resistance, before the liberation ushered in a new chapter in Geyl’s work. As already signalled by his Napoleon: For and Against (1946), published in English in 1949, he increasingly turned his attention to historical criticism and philosophical questions of history, and in the immediate post-war years famously engaged in a long and bitter public debate with Arnold Toynbee, partly conducted on the airwaves of the BBC, in which he took issue with the determinism of the British historian’s system of civilizations (1948/9).5 Many critical essays followed, in which Geyl sharply dissected the methodological framework of other historical scholars, past and present, and it is indeed this part of his work that brought him international fame and for which he is now best remembered in the anglophone world.6 Becoming a staunch defender of western civilization during the developing Cold War (which in some ways can be interpreted as a broadening out of his pre-war Dutch and ‘Greater Netherlands’ nationalism to take in the new geopolitical situation),7 he also became a much-sought-after commentator on many contemporary issues from the relationship between the Netherlands and Indonesia to the emerging economic and political integration of Europe. The Second World War had doubtless been the turning point of Geyl’s career. After it, as The Times wrote, ‘the lifelong rebel found himself an honoured patriarch; the scholar little known outside of Holland and England found himself a figure of world fame; and in his own country he rose easily and by acclaim to the pinnacle of his profession’.8

A polemicist and controversialist by nature, ‘he engaged in political and intellectual conflict with deadly zeal’9 or, as his former student and successor to the London chair (1935–57), Gustaaf Renier, expressed it: ‘He gave the Chair scholarly distinction and that aura of controversy that is the life-blood of the humanities. But he will also be remembered as the man who dined as Toynbee’s guest, before slaughtering him at the microphone. A man who neither looked to the right nor to the left and yet a kindly colleague and a gentleman.’10

An extremely prolific writer,11 among the most influential thinkers on history of all time12 and an early example of a ‘public historian’, Geyl, unsurprisingly, is a scholar whose life and work has received much attention, as well as major controversy, although interestingly his early years in London (1919–35) tend to figure much less prominently in these studies than Geyl’s later period in Utrecht (1935–66), certainly in those published in English. At the end of 2016, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, an international symposium was held at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), London, to re-examine Geyl’s time in Britain and his relationship with the anglophone world more generally and to shed new light on his multifaceted work as a historian, journalist, translator and political activist, on his contemporary networks, and on the lasting legacy of his work on British views of Low Countries history. The present volume, appearing shortly after the centenary of the foundation of the IHR (1921–2021), in the early years of which Geyl played an important role, and the centenary of his appointment as professor at the University of London in the autumn of 1919, is the result of this symposium, with a couple of additional contributions also included, and we hope and believe that it goes some way towards shedding light on the early Geyl, on his formative years in Britain, as well as on his relationship with the anglophone world more generally.

While there is no shortage of biographical sketches of Geyl, few provide much detail on his time in London and those that do cover the period view it largely through a Dutch or Belgian lens. In their critical assessments of Geyl’s historical work published in English, both Herbert Rowen (1965) and Hermann von der Dunk (1985) mention Geyl’s appointment in London, but in passing, as a stepping stone to future greatness as a historical critic and doyen of the Dutch historical profession after the Second World War.13 And while this assessment is certainly not incorrect, and coincides with Geyl’s own assessment of his early period as an ‘exile’ from Dutch academic and political life, by largely focusing this volume on Geyl’s period in London and investigating his relationship to Britain more generally, we hope to shift the emphasis slightly and to highlight how formative Geyl’s British experiences, both as a journalist and as an academic historian, were in his personality and historical thinking.

In Dutch language, the selection is somewhat greater, from J. C. Boogman and L. J. Rogier’s major commemorative articles from 1967 through Hermann von der Dunk’s levensbericht of Geyl for the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde from 1972 to the recollections of Ernst Kossmann (1998), Geyl’s second successor as occupant of the London chair (1957–66).14 There is also a great number of journal articles critical of Geyl’s political involvement with the Flemish movement in Belgium, which was at its heaviest in the 1920s and thus during his London period, some of the most important of which have been collected in a volume by Lode Wils (1994). The very divergent assessments of Geyl’s political involvement with the Flemish movement – or his meddling in internal Belgian affairs, depending on one’s vantage point – during his London years, in the 1970s and 80s even sparked a veritable Dutch–Belgian Historikerstreit that has never been fully resolved.15

Geyl of course also figures prominently in more general overviews of Low Countries historiography, as well as in historical encyclopaedias and handbooks in both languages.16 Still, and somewhat surprisingly for a figure of his stature, no monographical biography has seen the light of the day, neither in Dutch nor in English. The sheer volume of the papers of the extremely prolific and famously vain historian – throughout his life he kept carbon copies of almost every piece of correspondence he produced, to preserve them for eternity – seems to have been intimidating to potential biographers, although some of the most extensive and illuminating letter exchanges have been exemplarily edited.17 The most comprehensive biographical account of Geyl to date is provided by Jo Tollebeek in a chapter of his De toga van Fruin: Denken over geschiedenis in Nederland, 1860–1960 (1988).18 Marnix Beyen also devotes significant attention to Geyl, although the coverage of his Oorlog en verleden: Nationale geschiedenis in België en Nederland, 1938–1947 (2002) starts only after Geyl’s move to the Netherlands in 1936.19 This volume does not attempt to provide a full life-history of Geyl, but aims to contribute insights on Geyl’s early period in London and on his continued relationship with Britain and the anglophone world in later life, hopefully as input for a desirable full intellectual biography of Geyl, which someone might want to undertake in the future.

The importance to Geyl of his London years cannot be underestimated. When he arrived in the British capital at the age of twenty-five to take up the post of London correspondent of the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, only a few months before the outbreak of the First World War, he experienced it as a liberation:20 ‘The editor of his paper gave him complete freedom to write about everything that interested him, and Geyl made full use of this opportunity,’ as Charles Boxer writes, and when Geyl exchanged his journalistic career for an academic one in 1919 (although he struggled ‘for the first very difficult years’, as he himself described them), his position at the University of London gave him great satisfaction: ‘He became completely at home in the English academic world, where he had many friends and admirers, and several of his students have since produced admirable work in the field of Dutch history.’21

That Britain, and London in particular, continued to occupy a unique place in Geyl’s heart even after he had left what in the 1930s he increasingly came to regard as an ‘exile’ from the political and academic affairs of his home country, he expressed explicitly in a 1956 address to the Anglo-Netherlands Society, an organization of which Geyl had been a member during his time in London (then still known as the Anglo-Batavian Society). Recalling his wartime captivity, he told the audience:

How terribly important, a matter of life and death to us, helpless and forcibly inactive as we were, was the awful ordeal through which London passed in September 1940, and through all those years of the War. Our German guards at Buchenwald used to commiserate hypocritically with us on the doom of London when I arrived there as a hostage in 1940. We remained stoutly convinced that they were exaggerating, but in fact it was not until September 1945 that I was able to see with my own eyes that London was still London. That remains with me as the most vivid recollection of that first visit after the War. The relief that I felt, in spite of the terrible destruction around St Paul’s Cathedral and in so many other parts of the metropolis, that London was still there, that London was still London … I have more profound feeling of affection, admiration and gratitude for London than in the twenty-two years that I used to live here.22

But a volume on Geyl’s relationship with Britain would be incomplete without also devoting attention to the continued influence that Britain, and the anglophone world at large, had on Geyl, even after he had left the UK, and the influence he continued to exert there. For here, in the Public Record Office, today’s National Archives, he conducted a good part of the archival work that also his later historical work would draw on.23 His London period continued to inspire him even when he was imprisoned in German hostage camps during the Second World War, as a poem unearthed by Wim Berkelaar for this volume demonstrates, and his public debates with Arnold Toynbee, A. J. P. Taylor and other prominent British historians were hugely influential in the decades after 1945. As Ved Mehta, a prominent journalist on the New Yorker magazine, wrote in ‘Encounters with English intellectuals’ (1963), for which he interviewed Geyl in his home in Utrecht in the early 1960s, wrote: ‘He [Geyl] is well acquainted with – indeed a part of – the English historical scene,’24 despite being located elsewhere.

Geyl’s perfect command of the English language, in an age when this had not yet become second nature for continental historians, only added to his ability to build bridges across the Channel, as well as across the Atlantic, and it was in the anglophone world where he enjoyed his greatest success and popularity. While immediately after his departure for Utrecht in 1935, his colleagues in the history department at University College London (UCL) refused to add his portrait to the departmental gallery of former history professors, a decision that came close to being regarded as a ‘traitor’ (the honour was reserved for colleagues who had retired or passed away in office), high acclaim from Britain and the United States came to him after the war. In 1951 he was elected a corresponding member of the Royal Historical Society, of which he had been a fellow during his time in London (1921–35), followed by honorary memberships of the American Historical Association (1957) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1958). He received honorary doctorates from St Andrews University (1958) and Oxford University (1959), as well as from Harvard in the same year, and in 1961 was elected corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He spent time at Princeton (1949), Smith College, Massachussets (1952), Yale (1954), Stanford and Harvard (both 1957) and in 1966 was awarded the first MacVane Prize by Harvard’s history department for his distinguished contributions to European historiography. In 1959 Queen Elizabeth II made him, a lifelong anti-monarchist in his own country,25 a Commander of the British Empire (CBE).26 While developing this project we thus moved away from the original working title ‘Geyl in Britain’ to the more apt ‘Geyl and Britain’ and include chapters that focus both on the influence that his British connections continued to exert on Geyl after he left the UK, and vice versa, on the reception and impact that Geyl’s work continued to have in Britain and the anglophone world, while he was working in Utrecht. It is not without irony that Geyl, due to his obsession with ‘Groot-Nederland’, was more ‘Dutch’ in his time in London than in his later period in the Netherlands, whereas his influence in Britain and the wider anglophone world was much greater after he had left London. Most of the chapters in this volume focus on Geyl’s connections to Britain (although not always exclusively to Britain) in this sense, reflecting his widespread interests.

One aspect of Geyl’s work and life that we would like to point out particularly, as it encapsulates one of the central aspects of how we define the role of professional historians nowadays, and which gives Geyl an importance that outlasts some of his scholarship, which like most scholarship has eventually become superseded (Geyl, who coined the aphorism that history is ‘an argument without end’,27 would be the last one to contest this – or would he in this case?), is his role as one of the first ‘public historians’ immediately after the Second World War. As Remco Ensel discusses in more detail in his chapter, Geyl saw the historian’s role not restricted to the confines of the ivory tower but in engaging with the wider public, earning him the epithet ‘model historian’, as A. J. P. Taylor called him (in an almost Gilbert- and Sullivanesque way) in the Observer in 1963, a role towards which other historians ought to aspire.28 As several chapters in this volume point out, Geyl’s journalistic roots and affinity with the media29 had certainly laid the foundations for the development of this profile and the particular amalgam of scholarship, journalism and political activism, for which he was known, is what gave him ‘impact’, if not always in unproblematic ways.

During his London years, Geyl’s scholarship and his political activism could never be fully separated from each other; in fact, the publication of the first volume of his Geschiedenis van de Nederlandsche Stam (1930) was timed to coincide, or interfere, with the centenary celebrations of Belgium’s independence in 1830, the second partition of the Low Countries after that of the sixteenth century, a secession at odds with Geyl’s cherished ‘Greater Netherlands’ idea which inspired both his scholarship and his political activism. Pieter van Hees, co-editor of Geyl’s autobiography as well as several volumes of Geyl’s most important correspondence, introduces us to Geyl’s development and interpretation of this peculiar form of linguistic-nationalist thinking, both in the historiographical and the political fields. First put forward in three lectures at University College London in 1920, published together as Holland and Belgium: Their Common History and Relations in the year after, and developed in detail in the first volume of Geyl’s magnum opus Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Stam (1930; published in English as The Revolt in the Netherlands in 1932), he dismissed the then prevailing historical interpretation of the sixteenth-century partition of the Low Countries as deterministic and teleological. Rather than being a logical separation of the Republic of the United Provinces, the predecessor of the current Dutch state, and a proto-national version of Belgium, this division, according to Geyl, was the accidental and unintended consequence of military fortune and misfortune in the course of the Eighty Years’ War. Geography, in particular the barrier of the Great Rivers, rather than deep-rooted differences in identity to the north and south of it, had played the decisive role in the partition. Sparking controversial debates among Dutch and Belgian historians, Geyl’s more possibilistic reinterpretation of the history of the Revolt quickly caught on in the anglophone world of the 1930s, but there was also another, somewhat darker side to it: Geyl proposed not only that the hypothetical emergence of a state encompassing all Dutch-speaking parts of the old Burgundian lands had been disrupted by the outcome of the Eighty Years’ War but also that this, at least potentially irredentist, conception could be a way forward for solving the linguistic–communitarian differences in contemporary Belgium.

Naturally, his Greater Netherlands interpretation of Low Countries history and associated political agitation brought Geyl into open conflict with Belgian interests in Britain, in a way that is also of direct interest for the institutional history of the University of London. In an extended chapter, Ulrich Tiedau traces the conflict between Geyl and his Belgian counterpart and nemesis during his London years, Émile Cammaerts. Geyl and the Anglo-Belgian poet, like Geyl a semi-official spokesperson of his country of origin, became direct opponents in the propaganda battles between Dutch and Belgian interest groups trying to influence British academic, public and government opinion about the Low Countries in the aftermath of the First World War and especially in the approach to and during the Paris Peace Conference (1919/20), when, apart from a new world order, Belgian claims on Dutch territories and the international status of the River Scheldt were renegotiated. While Geyl had managed to exchange his journalistic post for the newly founded university chair of Dutch studies in 1919, it would take until 1931 for a Belgian counter-chair to be endowed, in an attempt to contain Geyl’s for Belgium deleterious influence on British opinion of the Low Countries. While they produced distinguished academic works, both scholars, as Tiedau shows, were never able to fully part with the propagandistic roots of their respective chairs, Geyl certainly not during his time in London. The (inter)disciplinary infrastructure they created did however lay the institutional foundations for the University of London to become one of the foremost centres for Dutch and Low Countries studies in the anglophone world. Central to Geyl’s success in British academia, as Stijn van Rossem shows, was his role in the early years of the Institute of the Historical Research (IHR), Albert Frederick Pollard’s initiative to pool the postgraduate activities of all historians across the various colleges of the University of London. While, initially, Geyl’s career at UCL and Bedford College was anything but a resounding success and, having alienated the powerful provost of UCL, Gregory Foster, he came close to losing his academic post in 1924, the IHR would become the vehicle for Geyl’s belated integration into the British historical profession. Not only was he able to develop close relations with scholars such as Hugh Bellot and John Neale through his involvement in the seminars30 and conferences of Pollard’s newly founded institute, but by arranging for the Dutch history books to be transferred from the library of Bedford College to the IHR, along with a considerable annual grant from the Dutch government to expand the collection, he built up the IHR Low Countries collection as one of the most important reference libraries on the subject in the anglophone world. Using new source material from the IHR archive, Van Rossem discusses the organization, growth and profile of this collection, considered to be one of Geyl’s major legacies at the University of London.

A little-known aspect of Geyl’s work is the subject of Wim Berkelaar’s chapter: Geyl’s literary ambitions. While he is remembered mainly for his historical work, Geyl also sought to obtain recognition as a poet and novelist. In his youth he imitated famous Dutch poets, without much success. During his London years he translated two medieval Dutch plays, Lancelot of Denmark (1923) and The Tale of Beatrice (1927), into English (both were staged in the West End), and also authored his own play. But, as Berkelaar shows, it was only during his internment during the Second World War that Geyl found his voice as a poet, writing about his desire for liberty, reminiscing about his years in London and expressing his view of history. After the liberation, Geyl’s poetry, as well as a detective novel, received a less than enthusiastic critical response: they were considered old-fashioned and of more interest as an expression of his experience in the camps than as a real contribution to literature. Nonetheless, in 1957, Geyl was awarded the P. C. Hooft Prize, the highest literary award in the Netherlands, for his life’s work, although that was of course predominantly historical.

Leen Dorsman traces the role of the idea of federalism as a political organizing principle for Geyl. Having become interested in the politics of empire during his time as London correspondent of the leading Dutch broadsheet Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (1913–19), he reported extensively from the British imperial conferences, where, with a view to securing the empire’s longevity, its possible reorganization along federal lines was contemplated, and adopted the approach as a possible way forward in other political contexts close to his heart. As Dorsman demonstrates, federalism as a concept recurs in Geyl’s thinking throughout his life, ranging from his well-known interventions on behalf of the Flemish movement in Belgium in the 1920s and ’30s, for example as co-author of the unsuccessful proposal of a federal statute for Belgium in 1929, put forward by the Flemish nationalist parliamentarian Herman Vos, to his lesser-known contributions to the debate about European integration in the 1950s.

Remco Ensel, as already indicated, investigates Geyl’s role as a public intellectual in post-1945 Europe. With his sparring partner Arnold Toynbee he was one of the first historians to embrace the medium of broadcasting, and the public debates between the two on BBC radio on the catastrophe that was the Second World War and on the historical profession, caught the public’s imagination. While both historians presented themselves as authoritative public intellectuals, the debate, which after 1948 developed into an intense dispute, illustrates how differently Geyl and Toynbee conceived their role in the post-war world. While Toynbee was not afraid to provide political and moral advice to the general public, even beyond the boundaries of his specialist knowledge, Geyl envisaged a more restricted role for professional historians. Re-analysing the debate, Ensel compares the two approaches, which gave rise to fundamental ‘post-Holocaust’ questions on collective and individual responsibility and guilt.

Geyl’s historical work on the eighteenth century is re-read by Reinier Salverda, examining its legacy to today’s historiography. As he points out, studying the eighteenth century was a lifelong intellectual pursuit for Geyl, from early on in his London years until the end of his career. Considering Geyl as a historian in his own time, quite different in style, character and commitments from contemporaries such as Johan Huizinga and Herman Theodoor Colenbrander, Salverda analyses Geyl’s investigations of the Dutch Republic’s ancien régime under the Orange stadholders and the breakthrough (in revolts well before the French Revolution) of the ‘new’ in late-eighteenth-century Dutch politics and society. While identifying certain limitations and blind spots in Geyl’s historical work on the period, his analysis clearly demonstrates the historical impact, lasting value and scholarly relevance today of Geyl’s contributions in this area. In a similar vein, Mark Edward Hay points to Geyl’s historiographical legacy for revolutionary and Napoleonic studies. While there is a tendency to seek and thus to find Geyl’s historiographical legacy predominantly in Low Countries history, his transnational comparison of revolutionary turmoil in the Dutch republic, the Austrian Netherlands and France in particular, Hay suggests, could, and should, be interpreted as a precursor to the watershed moment in revolutionary and Napoleonic studies that was Jacques Godechot’s and Robert Palmer’s ‘Atlantic thesis’. He also argues that Geyl’s monumental study of Napoleon, partly written in captivity during the Second World War (1946–8),31 not only marks a turning point in the biographical study of the emperor but also remains an important cornerstone for research on Napoleon to this day.

While before 1945 Geyl’s fame was largely restricted to the Low Countries and Britain (unlike, say, Huizinga, whose reputation was international), Geyl also gained limited recognition in Germany, not always in particularly savoury circles. Alisa van Kleef explores the extent of Geyl’s entanglement, during his time in London, with the networks of German Westforschung, an academic strand which, inspired by German völkisch and revisionist thought in the interwar period, showed interest in the countries neighbouring Germany to the west and later would become directly involved in the occupation policies and practices in the Benelux countries, as well as in France.32 The proximity of Geyl’s ethno-linguistic Greater Netherlands narrative to völkisch approaches in German historiography led on more than one occasion to Geyl being suspected of having been a ‘collaborator’ in these tendencies, in spite of his later becoming a victim of Nazism himself. Considering all the known instances in which Geyl became embroiled in German Westforschung, Van Kleef arrives at the conclusion that while it is obvious that Geyl let himself in with these academic circles to a greater extent than he would feel comfortable with retrospectively, the accusation of ‘collaboration’ on the whole is unwarranted. While the famously vain Geyl may have been flattered by the attention he received from German historians, the relationship was a very lopsided affair. The Westforschers were much more fascinated by Geyl, an unlikely source of support for their programme as a Dutch historian based in London, than vice versa, whereas his thinking at no time was determined by German but always by Dutch ideas, which in his case, of course, always needs to be read as Greater Netherlands ideas.

In a related vein, Fons Meijer investigates the afterlife of Pieter Geyl and his ‘Greater Netherlands’ activism, in particular the Dutch–Belgian Historikerstreit in the decades since Geyl’s passing about the ambivalent nature of his political commitment. Since the 1970s, Geyl’s Greater Netherlands conviction has been the focus of a fierce debate among Belgian and Dutch historians over whether Geyl had imperialist motives and secretly worked towards the dissolution of the Belgian state. While in his autobiographical writings Geyl tended to emphasize the moderate nature of his political activism, the publication of two extensive series of his correspondence in the 1970s and early 80s allowed historians to re-examine this self-portrayal. In subsequent years, Belgian historians have shown that Geyl was not, or at least not consistently, the moderate activist he claimed to be, but that his professed moderation was largely the result of tactical manoeuvring. In turn, these allegations initiated a stream of responses by Dutch historians attempting to debunk the accusations. By paying close attention to both the historical-rational arguments put forward by the participants of the debate and the larger social-political context in which it was conducted, Meijer surveys and historicizes the charged afterlife of Geyl’s ideological affiliation.

What remains is to thank the many people who helped bring this volume to publication: the IHR and Lawrence Goldman in particular for hosting the symposium, Julie Spraggon, Emma Gallon, Robert Davies and colleagues from University of London Press for accepting the manuscript for publication in the IHR conference series and seeing the book through to production, the anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable feedback, the contributors for their patience, Bart Jaski and colleagues from the Special Collections department of Utrecht University Library for permission to reproduce some of the photographs from Geyl’s time in London and, last but not least, Andrea Meyer Ludowisy from Senate House Library for supporting the project all along the way.

Shortly before the completion of this volume, the sad news reached us that Pieter van Hees (14 October 1937–20 April 2021) had passed away. During his student years Geyl’s assistant, organizer of his voluminous Nachlass papers, co-editor of Geyl’s autobiography and several volumes of his correspondence and author of numerous scholarly articles on Geyl, nobody on earth knew Geyl and his voluminous papers better than Pieter.33 His kind and generous support to the editors and contributors of this volume was much valued and it is a great sorrow that he does not live to see its publication. He will be greatly missed and it is to his memory that we would like to dedicate this volume.