EDWARD GIBBON

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Abridged Edition

Edited and abridged by
David Womersley

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Volumes 1–6 of the full edition first published 1776, 1781 and 1788
This abridged edition published 2000
Reprinted with revised Selected Further Reading 2005

Editorial matter copyright © David Womersley, 2000, 2005
All rights reserved

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-90658-4

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

GIBBON’S PREFACES

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

[CHAPTERS IV–VI]

CHAPTER VII

[CHAPTERS VIII–XIV]

CHAPTER XV

[CHAPTERS XVI–XXI]

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

[CHAPTERS XXV–XXVII]

CHAPTER XXVIII

[CHAPTERS XXIX–XXXIII]

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

[CHAPTERS XXXVI–XXXVIII]

General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West

[CHAPTER XXXIX]

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

[CHAPTERS XLII–XLIX]

CHAPTER L

[CHAPTERS LI–LIII]

CHAPTER LIV

[CHAPTERS LV–LXVII]

CHAPTER LXVIII

[CHAPTERS LXIX–LXX]

CHAPTER LXXI

A Note on the Text

Chronology

Selected Further Reading

Biographica

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in the references given in the Introduction:

Chronology

Introduction

At the end of his life, Gibbon gratefully acknowledged that The Decline and Fall had given him ‘a name, a rank, a character, in the world, to which [he] should not otherwise have been entitled’ (A, p. 346). But at the outset of his literary career, those priorities were necessarily reversed: the book received its character from its author. How did the circumstances of Gibbon’s upbringing and early manhood influence his historical vision?

Gibbon’s Early Life and Upbringing

Gibbon’s great-grandfather had been a linendraper, and his grandfather, the first Edward Gibbon, was a successful man of business. Happily his ‘opinions were subordinate to his interest’ and accordingly, notwithstanding his Jacobite inclinations, as an army contractor the Continental campaigns of William III had made him a wealthy man (A, p. 10). In 1716 he had become a director of the South Sea Company, and inevitably ‘his fortune was overwhelmed in the shipwreck of the year twenty, and the labours of thirty years were blasted in a single day’ (A, p. 11). A fortune of over £ 100,000 was reduced to £10,000. Yet he was unconquered by adversity: he rebuilt his fortune, and at his death in 1736 he was once more a man of substance.

In 1707 had been born his only son, Edward Gibbon, the father of the historian. Edward Gibbon senior attended Westminster School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, entering the House of Commons in 1734 as Member for Petersfield, in which neighbourhood the Gibbons owned a considerable estate. On 3 June 1736 he had married Judith, daughter of James Porten, a neighbour of the Gibbons in Putney, and it was from this union (‘a marriage of inclination and esteem’– A, p. 19) that Edward Gibbon the historian was born on 27 April 1737 OS, some five months after the death of his grandfather. There were six further children, none of whom lived for more than a year, and Mrs Gibbon herself died on 26 December 1747. Gibbon had been largely neglected by his mother, and his father–cast into depression by the death of his wife–was beginning to advance down the path of undramatic yet unremitting dissipation (entertainment, gambling, neglect of business) which was to erode the family wealth and prevent Gibbon’s circumstances from ever being truly easy. The sickly child was cared for by his aunt, Catherine Porten, who instilled in him that love of reading which on her death in 1786 Gibbon cited as ‘still the pleasure and glory of my life’ (L, iii. 46). His early education was entrusted initially to a private tutor, the clergyman, minor author and grammarian John Kirkby, and then to the grammar school at Kingston-upon-Thames. In January 1748 he entered Westminster. The shock of arrival at this school, which Gibbon later recalled as ‘a cavern of fear and sorrow’, was mitigated by the fact that his aunt Porten undertook at the same time to run a boarding-house for the school, and it was with her that Gibbon lodged during his two years at Westminster (A, p. 60). In 1750, however, a mysterious nervous illness obliged him to leave off formal schooling and take the waters in Bath. During the next two years the uncertain state of his health inhibited any regular schemes of education. Gibbon’s constitution suddenly recovered at the end of 1751, but his father then made two serious errors of judgement which were full of implications for the future life of his son. In the first place, and on the recommendation of his close friends David and Lucy Mallet, he decided to entrust Gibbon’s education to the feckless and neglectful Reverend Philip Francis. It was clear within two months that the experiment had been a failure, and in response to this disappointment Edward Gibbon senior thereupon embraced ‘a singular and desperate measure’ (A, p. 56) and made his second great mistake. He resolved to send his son without further ado to Oxford.

Edward Gibbon senior had arranged for his son to proceed to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a Gentleman Commoner, and in April 1752 Gibbon arrived in Oxford ‘with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a Doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed’ (A, p. 394). In his Memoirs Gibbon drew a damning picture of Oxford, as a university sunk in port and prejudice, and almost completely indifferent to its educational mission. It is a picture which seems now to have been overdrawn. But that the university failed him, there can be no doubt. His first tutor, Dr Waldegrave, was a learned and pious man who seems to have taken his duties seriously, but who was out of his depth when it came to directing the studies of this unusual student. When Waldegrave departed for a college living in Sussex, Gibbon was transferred ‘with the rest of his live stock’ to Dr Winchester, who, according to Gibbon, ‘well remembered that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform’ (A, p. 81). Deprived of any regular course of instruction, Gibbon soon fell into habits of indolence and absenteeism, interspersed with bouts of intense but miscellaneous reading – what at the end of his life he was to call the ‘blind activity of idleness’ (A, p. 84).

In the vacancy left by study, Gibbon pursued a course of reading which insensibly disposed him to Roman Catholicism. Accordingly, on 8 June 1753, Gibbon ‘abjured the errors of heresy’ (A, p. 88) and was received into the Romish faith by Baker, one of the chaplains of the Sardinian ambassador. If the’humanity of the age’ (A, p. 88) was averse to persecution, there were still in 1753 numerous penal statutes in force against Roman Catholics, and the affair made sufficient stir for Lewis, a Roman Catholic bookseller of Covent Garden who had acted as go-between, to be summoned before the Privy Council and questioned. The crisis elicited from Gibbon’s father a characteristic response of contradictory extremity. His first thought was that scepticism was the best antidote to credulity, and so Gibbon was sent to David Mallet, by ‘whose philosophy [he] was rather scandalized than reclaimed’ (A, p. 130). He next sought the advice of his relative Edward Eliot, who recommended a period of residence in Switzerland. Accordingly Gibbon was entrusted to the care of M. Daniel Pavilliard, a Calvinist minister of Lausanne.

Gibbon’s first period of residence in Lausanne (1753-8) was one of remarkable development on several fronts. In his Memoirs he fully recognized the significance of this episode in his life: ‘Whatsoever have been the fruits of my education, they must be ascribed to the fortunate shipwreck which cast me on the shores of the Leman lake’ (A, p. 239). If it was indeed at Lausanne that, as he was to put it in another draft, ‘the statue was discovered in the block of marble’ then substantial credit for releasing Gibbon’s true identity must rest with Pavilliard, whom his charge would later praise as ‘the first father of my mind’ (A, pp. 152 and 297). His wisdom, tact and kindness were evident immediately in the steps he took to humanize the severe régime which Edward Gibbon senior wished to impose on the son who had displeased him. The first priority was the need to rectify Gibbon’s religious opinions. Here Pavilliard found that he was engaged in an intellectual war of attrition, having to despatch each separate perceived error individually. It was only when Gibbon chanced upon what he took to be a decisive argument against transubstantiation that ‘the various articles of the Romish creed disappeared like a dream’ (A, p. 137). On Christmas Day, 1754, he took communion, returned to Protestantism, and ‘suspended [his] Religious enquiries’: a form of words compatible with many different shades of both belief and unbelief (A, p. 137).

This indiscretion now behind him, under Pavilliard’s guidance Gibbon began a programme of serious and methodical reading in classical and modern literature. In the first place, he began to repair the shortcomings in his reading facility in Latin. Thereafter, he studied mathematics, and the logic of De Crousaz. Although he left off these subjects before his mind was ‘hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence’, they nevertheless must have reinforced the ability for analysis which gradually began to assert itself in the notes Gibbon kept of his reading (A, p. 142). Gibbon followed the advice of Locke, and ‘digested’ his reading into a ‘large Commonplace-book’, although this was a practice concerning which he later had misgivings, agreeing with Johnson that ‘what is twice read is commonly better remembered than what is transcribed’ (A, pp. 143 – 4). It was at this time, too, when the possibilities of the life of the mind were becoming vivid to him, and when he may have first suspected the extent of his own abilities, that Gibbon first encountered some of the writers who would most influence his mature work: Pascal, de la Bléterie and Giannone. In due course he became sufficiently emboldened to enter into correspondence on points of classical philology with established scholars such as Crévier, Breitinger and Gesner.

In the autumn of 1755 Gibbon’s father gave permission for his son, accompanied by Pavilliard, to undertake a tour of Switzerland. The purpose of the tour was not to imbibe ‘the sublime beauties of Nature’, but rather to view at first hand the different constitutions of the various cantons, to visit the most substantial towns and cities, and to make the acquaintance of the most eminent persons (A, p. 144). In what may be a foretaste of his mature historical interests, he recalls being particularly struck by the Abbey of Einsidlen, a palace ‘erected by the potent magic of Religion’ (A, p. 145).

Early in his residence at Lausanne, Gibbon had begun the first of the two important friendships of his life. Georges Deyverdun, a young Swiss of good family but only moderate abilities, became the companion of his studies. Later, in 1757, Gibbon met Suzanne Curchod (who was subsequently to become Mme Necker, and the mother of Mme de Staël): here he formed a romantic, but ultimately fruitless, attachment which was to founder on the rocks of implacable paternal opposition. Two further connections Gibbon made while at Lausanne throw suggestive light over his intellectual, rather than emotional, life. He became the friend of a local Protestant minister, Francçois-Louis Allamand, with whom he debated Locke’s metaphysics: by engaging with Allamand’s dissimulated scepticism, Gibbon ‘acquired some dexterity in the use of… philosophic weapons’ (A, p. 147). Secondly, when Voltaire took up residence in Lausanne, Gibbon (who was now moving in polite Vaudois society) was occasionally invited to the theatrical performances he gave and the supper parties which followed them. Gibbon later said that as a young man he had ‘rated [Voltaire] above his real magnitude’ (A, p. 148). Certainly in the later volumes of The Decline and Fall he permits himself some sharp asides at Voltaire’s expense. Nevertheless, the Frenchman’s influence is palpable in the first volume of the history, and it is not difficult to imagine the young Englishman being inspired not by Voltaire’s scandalous philosophy, to be sure, but rather by the way in which Voltaire embodied literary celebrity. Perhaps uncoincidentally, it was during his last few months at Lausanne that Gibbon began to sketch the outline of and collect the materials for his own first literary work, the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (‘Essay on the Study of Literature’).

On 8 May 1755 Edward Gibbon senior had married Dorothea Patton, introducing her to his son by letter as the ‘Lady that saved your life at Westminster by recommending Dr Ward when you was given over by the regular Physicians’ (Prothero, i. 9). Gibbon approached his stepmother with understandable, although happily unnecessary, apprehension. He would soon be able to entrust his journal with the sentiment that ‘I love her as a companion, a friend and a mother’ (Journal, p. 72). On Gibbon’s return to England, his father, whose financial difficulties had become pressing, persuaded him to permit the cancelling of the entail on the family estate, so that much-needed money might be raised by a mortgage on the property. In return, Gibbon was to receive an annuity of £300. He thus achieved a measure of independence, but was still in fact very much under his father’s control. When Gibbon informed his father that while in Lausanne he had fallen in love with the pretty, but penniless, Suzanne Curchod, his father’s opposition to the match was unyielding. This intransigence placed Gibbon in a dilemma between marriage and scholarship, since his annuity was insufficient for him to study and be a husband. In his Memoirs Gibbon recorded his capitulation to his father’s insistence in a phrase which has done him lasting harm amongst the sentimental: ‘I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son’(A, p. 239).

Between 1758 and 1763 Gibbon’s life was divided between the family estate at Buriton and London lodgings in New Bond Street. He frequented the cosmopolitan and philosophic salon of the francophile Lady Hervey, and sought relaxation in regular theatre-going. In Hampshire his life was less fashionable but more profitable. For country pursuits he had little relish, although his letters record that he occasionally went hunting and accompanied his father to the local races. It was also out of filial duty that Gibbon became involved in Hampshire politics, where his father continued to be active. But even in the midst of these distractions, he was able to pursue a literary life of sorts. The library at Buriton was acknowledged to be his ‘peculiar domain’. It was a mixed collection of books, including ‘much trash of the last age… much High Church divinity and politics’, but also ‘some valuable Editions of the Classics and Fathers’ (A, p. 248). He began to reacquaint himself with ‘the purity, the grace, the idiom, of the English style’ by studying Swift and Addison, and some of the qualities of his mature prose might be traced to the complementary influences of these writers (A, p. 251). At this stage of his life Gibbon also attended church for morning and evening service. He records that the reflections prompted by the lessons drove him to Grotius’s De Veritate Religionis Christiana:, and thence – he implies for the first time – to a ‘regular tryal of the evidence of Christianity’; a telling although silent judgement on the circumstances of his conversion to Roman Catholicism (A, p. 249). It was also at this time that he purchased the twenty volumes of the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions; a work which eventually would be of major importance for The Decline and Fall.

The main claim on Gibbon’s time during these years, however, was the South Hampshire militia, in which he served as captain and his father as major. Their commissions were dated 12 June 1759; the regiment was embodied in May 1760; and it was disembodied on 23 December 1762. At the end of his life Gibbon was willing to credit the militia with bestowing on him a ‘larger introduction into the English World’; it was, for instance, through the militia that Gibbon met John Wilkes (A, p. 401). Yet, despite leading him into such lively company, even at the time this ‘mimic Bellona’ was more resented than enjoyed (A, p. 299).

It was during his militia service that Gibbon published his first book, and thereby lost (as he put it) his literary maidenhead. In France philosophes such as d’Alembert had disparaged as minute and arid the work of the érudits, or scholars, especially those associated with the Académie des Inscriptions. The Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761), which Gibbon had begun in Lausanne, and which he had completed at Buriton, sought to reconcile the érudits and the philosophes by arguing that ‘all the faculties of the mind may be exercised and displayed by [the] study of ancient literature’ (A, p. 167). The argument of the Essai was a temperate reproach to what Gibbon saw as the intellectual arrogance of the philosophes. In 1762 he began also to revolve subjects for a work of biographical or historical narrative, entertaining the possibility of writing on Raleigh, on the history of the liberty of the Swiss, and on the history of Florence under the Medicis. On closer inspection, he rejected all these possibilities; but the very fact of their being weighed was a sign of growing literary ambition. The form which that ambition was to take was determined by the next major event in Gibbon’s life. ‘According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English Gentleman’ (A, p. 198); Gibbon’s father had agreed, after some travailing, to pay for a European tour. Within seven days of the demobilization of the South Hampshire militia, Gibbon was making preparations. He left Dover on 25 January 1763, and arrived in Paris three days later.

Gibbon found Paris thronged with English tourists, but the Essai distinguished him to some extent amongst the crowd, and procured for him the reception of a man of letters. He was received by Mme Geoffrin, he engaged in one or two inconsequential flirtations, and mingled (albeit warily) with philosophes such as Helvétius and d’Holbach. In May he travelled, by way of Dijon and Besancçon, to Lausanne, where he was to remain until the spring of 1764. He resumed his acquaintance with Voltaire, and it was apparently at Ferney that the final rupture with Suzanne Curchod took place. Gibbon’s early months in Lausanne were marked by some mildly riotous episodes in which he and some other young Englishmen lodging in the town, too much enlivened by burgundy, created nocturnal disturbances. One of these companions was William Guise, with whom Gibbon would the following year make the tour of Italy. Later they were joined by John Baker Holroyd, afterwards Lord Sheffield. A cavalryman in the regular army, Holroyd initially teased Gibbon over his militia career, and their friendship began slowly, although it was to become the most important relationship of Gibbon’s adult life. In the midst of these dissipations Gibbon began to prepare himself for what promised to be the most valuable portion of his tour: he launched himself upon a course of hard study, focusing on the geography of ancient Italy.

The extension of Gibbon’s tour to Italy was imperilled at almost the last moment by his father’s financial difficulties, but these were temporarily resolved. Gibbon and Guise left Lausanne on 18 April 1764, crossed the Alps, and spent the first summer in Florence. In the autumn they moved on to Rome, and (at least as Gibbon chose later to present it) the conception of his life’s work: ‘It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind’ (A, p. 302). From Rome they moved to Naples and Venice, which was not to Gibbon’s taste: ‘a fine bridge spoilt by two Rows of houses upon it, and a large square decorated with the worst Architecture I ever yet saw’ (L, i. 193). These final months of Gibbon’s tour were marred by the embarrassment of his credit being stopped. It was apparently a misunderstanding, although one symptomatic of the complicated state of the family’s finances, which required Gibbon to forget the idea of prolonging his travels in the south of France. He was back in England by late June 1765, but not before he had paused for ten days in Paris to visit Suzanne Curchod, now transformed from a young Swiss woman on the verge of destitution and spinsterhood into the wife of the wealthy financier Jacques Necker.

On his return from the Continent, Gibbon resumed the pattern of life he had formed before his tour. He retained his commission in the militia, rising to the ranks of major and, in 1768, lieutenant-colonel. This involved him in only a month of drilling each year, but he gradually found this connection more irksome and less diverting, and consequently he resigned his commission in 1770. When in London he frequented clubs such as the Cocoa Tree (still in the 1760s the haunt of Tories), the excitingly named, although actually respectable, School of Vice, and the Romans, a weekly gathering of those who had made the tour of Italy. However, Gibbon’s ability to enjoy London society was diminished by the worsening state of the family finances, and by the deteriorating state of his father’s health. Gibbon devoted much time and energy to attempts at remedying the former, but his father, made petulant and suspicious by illness, frustrated his son’s schemes for improvement. Only after Edward Gibbon senior’s death could decisive action be taken.

Relief from these difficulties came in the form of friendship, study and writing. In 1765 Georges Deyverdun had come to London, and was to spend the next four summers at Buriton. In due course he obtained a post as clerk in the Northern Department of the office of the Secretary of State, and he and Gibbon began to collaborate on various literary projects. He helped Gibbon by translating for him the German sources for a projected ‘History of the Swiss Republics’, which Gibbon began to compose in French. Hume (who was then under-secretary in the office where Deyverdun worked) encouraged Gibbon to persevere with this history, advising him only that if he were writing for posterity English was preferable to French. But when in 1767 the work in progress was read to a London literary circle, and was coolly received, Gibbon decided to abandon it. Their next project was a literary periodical, the Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne (1768-9), which was designed to inform Continental readers of developments in English literature. But since it was published in London and not distributed abroad amongst its intended readership, it unsurprisingly failed to achieve its goal. Other works, if not immediately more fruitful, can nevertheless be judged more positively when viewed in the long perspective of Gibbon’s literary career, either because they indicate approaches (albeit hesitant) towards the subject matter of The Decline and Fall, or because they display the gradual forging of the technical and stylistic resources on which the great history would rely. Gibbon later regretted the Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of Vergil’s Aeneid (1770), his anonymous attack on Warburton’s theory of Virgil as an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries. But it shows Gibbon beginning to deploy irony for polemical purposes, and refining his understanding of the handling of historical evidence. The unpublished essay on oriental history ‘Sur la monarchie des Mèdes’ shows Gibbon reflecting on the principles and practice of philosophic history. Other tantalizing hints about Gibbon’s scholarly projects in the later 1760s point forwards to The Decline and Fall. In particular there was apparently ‘an ample dissertation on the miraculous darkness of the passion’, which has not survived, but in which Gibbon tells us that he ‘privately drew [his] conclusions from the silence of an unbelieving age’ (A, p.285).

The Historian of the Roman Empire

Gibbon’s father died on 12 November 1770, his constitution undermined by financial anxiety. Guided by Holroyd, who was an efficient and practical man of business, the Gibbon family finances were reorganized and simplified. By the end of 1772, Buriton had been let, Mrs Gibbon had retired to Bath, and Gibbon was elegantly housed in 7 Bentinck Street, Cavendish Square. For the first time he could arrange his life entirely in accordance with his own wishes; and only now did he enjoy ‘the first of earthly blessings, independence’ (A, p. 307). The year 1774 was a notable one: during its course he became a member of Samuel Johnson’s Club, ‘a large and luminous constellation of British stars’ (A, p. 307, n. 27); he was admitted as a mason; and in October he was returned as the Member of Parliament for Liskeard, thanks to the influence of his kinsman Edward Eliot. At almost the same time as he was returned to Parliament, Gibbon had been negotiating the contract for The Decline and Fall with the eminent firm of Strahan and Cadell. For, during the previous years, Gibbon had ‘gradually advanced from the wish to the hope, from the hope to the design, from the design to the execution, of my historical work, of whose nature and limits I had yet a very inadequate notion’ (A, p. 411). The press was set to work in June 1775, and on 17 February 1776, volume one of The Decline and Fall appeared at a price of one guinea, unbound.

The book sold with great rapidity. The first edition of volume one – of which, almost at the last minute, Strahan had presciently ordered the print run to be doubled from five hundred to a thousand copies - was exhausted ‘in a few days’ (A, p. 311; Norton, pp. 36– 47). A second edition followed in June 1776, a third in 1777, and the fourth in 1781. Nor does Gibbon seem to have exaggerated when at the end of his life he recalled that ‘my book was on every table, and almost on every toilette’ (A, p. 311). From the chorus of praise, the admiration of Adam Ferguson, Joseph Warton and Horace Walpole must have been deeply gratifying. It was, however, David Hume’s letter of congratulation which according to Gibbon ‘overpaid the labour of ten years’ (A, pp. 311-12). But its praise was laced with the warning tones of bitter experience:

When I heard of your undertaking (which was some time ago) I own that I was a little curious to see how you would extricate yourself from the subject of your two last chapters [that is, chapters XV and XVI, on the early Christian church]. I think you have observed a very prudent temperament; but it was impossible to treat the subject so as not to give grounds of suspicion against you, and you may expect that a clamour will arise. (A, p. 312, n. 30)

Hume, of all men, would not have claimed to be a prophet. Nevertheless, so it came to pass.

The published attacks on The Decline and Fall began with James Chelsum’s Remarks (1776; second, and significantly enlarged, edition 1778), and continued with – to mention only the most significant – Richard Watson’s Apology for Christianity (1776), Henry Davis’s Examination (1778), Joseph Milner’s Gibbon’s Account of Christianity Considered (1781), Joseph Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782) and Joseph White’s Bampton Lectures (1784); Gibbon had therefore managed to displease all stripes of religious opinion, from High Church dogmatists to dissenters. Their lines of attack resolved into two main charges: first, that Gibbon had merely restated in a fashionable form the familiar arguments levelled by infidels against Christianity since late antiquity; and second, that in order to make his opinions seem less scandalous he had manipulated the historical record, quoting selectively and even with deliberate inaccuracy. Gibbon waited until 1779 to reply to his critics in a pamphlet which was immediately recognized as a classic of literary polemic: his Vindication of Some Passages in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters.

In the Vindication Gibbon said that he had been stung to reply to his critics only when, with the publication of Henry Davis’s attack on him in 1778, the ground of contention was shifted from his religious to his literary and even moral character. But he seems first to have discussed the possibility of writing a vindication with William Robertson over dinner when Davis’s Examination was not yet published, and when he had been enraged by the publication of the second edition of Chelsum’s Remarks. The decision to direct the Vindication at Davis must therefore be construed as a tactical choice. Davis had given Gibbon an opportunity to scatter his enemies by engaging them on the terrain of scholarly accuracy and fair-dealing. This was more to his liking than the boggy and equivocal ground of the irreligious tendencies of chapters XV and XVI. More attacks appeared, to which Gibbon did not deign to reply, although in volume two of The Decline and Fall some notes vented his irritation at attacks on his scholarly accuracy. The Vindication was Gibbon’s only public engagement with his detractors, and in the opinion of all but the detractors themselves, his victory was complete. Horace Walpole warmed to its lethal ironies when he praised it as ‘the feathered arrow of Cupid, that is more formidable than the club of Hercules’ (MW, ii. 159).

The success of The Decline and Fall smoothed Gibbon’s path into fresh areas of society. We find him joining new clubs, such as Almack’s, and amusing himself by attending lectures in chemistry and anatomy. In May 1777 he left London to spend six months in Paris, where he found the tribute of flattery much more ample and to his taste than had been the case during his earlier visit in 1763. His political career continued. In a footnote to chapter XXII of The Decline and Fall, Gibbon corrected Montesquieu’s misapprehension that Jacobite toasts were illegal in England. It was important for him to believe that the political climate of the time was such that party divisions and animosities were obsolete, for only then would politeness be secure. It had therefore pleased him that both supporters of the royal prerogative and Whigs of radical temper had perceived a reflection of their own, widely divergent, political beliefs in the first volume of The Decline and Fall. But the war with the American colonists, now in its third year, threatened once more to infect English political life with the curse of party. For the duration of the conflict Gibbon stayed, in respect at least of his actions, if not his sentiments, loyal to Lord North. He even composed a state paper, the Mémoire justificatif (1779), criticizing the French for their involvement in the dispute with the colonists. But he was never an enthusiast for the armed struggle, in which he found the issues of right and wrong obscure, the practical consequences appalling. It may be that here we can trace the influence of Burke, and of Charles James Fox, whom Gibbon met from time to time at Almack’s, and in whose circle he socialized.

Gibbon had reasons of the most persuasive kind for standing by Lord North. His financial situation was pressing. Because of an amiable tendency to regard luxuries as necessities, his expenditure comfortably exceeded his income. Attempts to sell the Gibbon family estate of Lenborough in Buckinghamshire had come to nothing, and the price of land was now falling because of the war. The alternatives were to abandon his expensive and fashionable life in London, or to acquire a fresh source of income. Gibbon’s preferred solution was to receive one of the lucrative sinecures in the gift of government. In July 1779 he received the reward of his silent loyalty to the administration, and was appointed to the Board of Trade and Plantations at a salary of £750. For the time being, his situation was eased. And throughout all these distractions he had been writing and studying: ‘Shall I add that I never found my mind more vigorous or my composition more happy than in the winter hurry of society and Parliament?’ (A, p. 316). In September 1780, however, Gibbon lost his seat in Parliament when Edward Eliot transferred his loyalty to the opposition, ‘and the Electors of Leskeard are commonly of the same opinion as Mr Eliot’ (A, p. 322). In this interval of Gibbon’s senatorial life, volumes two and three of The Decline and Fall were published on 1 March 1781.

The public received the second and third volumes of The Decline and Fall politely, but (as was only to be expected) without the excitement which Gibbon had found so flattering in 1776. He wisely gave himself a year’s holiday after the publication of his second instalment, spending time in Brighton and at Hampton Court, and reading Greek literature. In June 1781 through the influence of Lord North he re-entered the House of Commons as the Member for Lymington. But within the year the Board of Trade was suppressed on grounds of economy, and Gibbon consequently found himself without the salary which made possible his London life. For a while he hung on in the hope of something else (a post in the Customs and a secretaryship at the embassy in Paris were apparently discussed). Against the background of the astonishing political manœuvres of 1782-3, Gibbon resumed work on The Decline and Fall, and by 1783 volume four was virtually complete. When it was clear that his political masters were going to do nothing for him, he set about extricating himself from the financial embarrassments which could only become more tightly constricting were he to remain in England.

In May 1783 Gibbon wrote to his friend Georges Deyverdun to explore the possibility of their living together in Switzerland. It was a project they had apparently discussed with enthusiasm on many occasions, and now that Deyverdun had inherited La Grotte, a substantial house in Lausanne, there were no practical obstacles to prevent the realization of this favourite scheme. Despite the misgivings of both Sheffield and his stepmother, Gibbon left Bentinck Street for Lausanne on 1 September 1783. Although all was not quite prepared for his reception, Gibbon soon professed great satisfaction with his new life, which was by some margin less fashionable than that he had led in London, but in the main more wholesome, and more genially sociable. Perhaps as a consequence, the pace of composition now slackened a little, but nevertheless by June 1787 Gibbon had completed the manuscript of the final three volumes of his history, and he embalmed the complex emotion of the moment in a celebrated passage of the Memoirs:

It was on the day, or rather the night, of the 27^th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of Acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all Nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious. (A, pp. 333-4)

In August he travelled to London with the manuscript, for which he received £4,000 from Strahan and Cadell; for its day, a good price. Social visits to Sheffield Place, to his stepmother in Bath and to friends in London, together with the chaperoning of Wilhelm de Sévery, the son of Swiss friends, occupied Gibbon until, on 8 May 1788, the double festival of his fifty-first birthday and the publication of the third instalment of The Decline and Fall could be celebrated with a literary dinner given by Cadell.

Less than a year after Gibbon’s return to Lausanne, Deyverdun died, carried away in July 1789 by a series of apoplectic strokes. Deyverdun’s will gave Gibbon a life interest in La Grotte, and his financial situation was now more healthy thanks to sales of property in England, so his material circumstances were if anything improved. But Gibbon was profoundly shaken by the death of his friend, and lapsed into a depression from which he only gradually emerged, to resume once more the mild pleasures of society. However, this agreeable life was itself soon to be menaced. Deyverdun had expired almost as the French Revolution was born. Gibbon was at first moderately encouraged by the turn of events in France: the ancien régime had needed urgent reform, as he acknowledged. But his sanguine hopes were soon abandoned as the violent character of the Revolution asserted itself. When Sheffield and his family journeyed to Lausanne to visit Gibbon in 1791, they came by way of Paris, and reported gloomily on what they had seen there - sombre news, later to be confirmed by the September massacres of 1792 and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. The closeness of the historian of decline to the epochal events which began the dismantling of the culture from within which and, to some degree, on behalf of which he had written make these closing years one of the most fascinating periods of Gibbon’s life.

The Revolution claimed an unexpected victim when Lady Sheffield died in April 1793; she had fallen sick while caring for émigrés at Guy’s Hospital. Gibbon set out at once on the potentially dangerous journey across Europe to be with his newly widowed friend. He found Sheffield already reconciled to his loss, and spent a pleasant summer with him in the Sussex countryside. It was soon clear, however, that Gibbon’s own health was not sound. For many years he had neglected a swelling in his groin. Its size was now so great – ‘almost as big as a small child’ was the disconcerting simile on which Gibbon’s pen settled (L, iii. 359) – that even Gibbon, who had ignored the problem for as long as possible, and who engagingly believed that it had escaped the notice of others, was driven to seek the assistance of the surgeons. It is said that when he first consulted his doctor, he opened the consultation with a joke which mischievously linked his present complaint with his parliamentary career: ‘Why is a fat man like a Cornish elector? Because both of them never see their member.’ He was tapped three times during the winter of 1793-4, and prodigious quantities of fluid were drawn off. On the third occasion the knife was dirty. Peritonitis set in, and developed swiftly. Three days after his last operation, and only one day after he had pronounced that he was good for a further ‘ten, twelve, or perhaps twenty years’, at 12.45 p.m. on 16 January 1794, Gibbon died.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Reviewing Gibbon’s early life, the striking fact emerges that his most effectual education occurred outside England and English institutions. It did not take an English form, and the values which it instilled were not in the first instance English values. And this European conditioning, in which England was but one part of a broader continental grouping of nations (what Gibbon would later call a ‘Christian republic’), stayed with Gibbon until the end of his life (DF, ii. 433). Although, in the midst of the French Revolution, he would claim to ‘glory in the character of an Englishman’, his aesthetic judgements (as when for instance he shrewdly described an enthusiasm for Shakespeare as the ‘first duty’ [A, p. 149] of an Englishman) demonstrate his freedom from any narrowly national outlook.

This freedom of mind left a trace even on that most obvious and celebrated feature of his prose, namely his ironic wit:

[The younger Gordian’s] manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation. (ADF, p. 98-9)

An air of mild indecency often hangs around such moments in The Decline and Fall. They recall Richard Porson’s comments on Gibbon’s lubricity:

Nor does his humanity ever slumber, unless when women are ravished, or the Christians persecuted… A less pardonable fault is [a] rage for indecency… If the history were anonymous, I should guess that these disgraceful obscenities were written by some debauchee, who having from age, or accident, or excess, survived the practice of lust, still indulged himself in the luxury of speculation. ¹

Gibbon could, we know, offend against English standards of propriety. But Porson is wrong, I think, to see in such passages a simple ‘rage for indecency’. Gibbon’s neglect of the customary decorums flowed not from the disposition of a libertine, but from the peculiarities of his upbringing, which had not trained his mind to observe the usual boundaries. Although Gibbon eventually moved in the highest circles, in both London and Lausanne, the anecdotes we have about his behaviour in company – his occasionally comic lack of insight into how others perceived him, his carelessness over his personal hygiene – suggest that, beneath or around the edges of his manifest urbanity, he remained oddly unsocialized.

If that disposition to disregard the customary had, in society, some problematic consequences, its effect on Gibbon’s historical vision was richly positive. The freedom of character which sometimes caused Gibbon to offend English susceptibilities also ensured that his richly imaginative apprehension of the past was never confined within the boundaries of received opinion. How did that independence of mind show itself? In the first place, it conditioned what we might call the style of Gibbon’s historical thought.

During Gibbon’s first period of residence in Switzerland he became, as we have seen, acquainted with Voltaire. This was a point of entry to the world of French Enlightenment philosophy which was later deepened by reading, and broadened by the further personal contacts with other philosophes which Gibbon made when visiting Paris in 1763 and 1777. For many of Gibbon’s contemporaries – particularly his clerical adversaries - this was enough to make him the ‘English Voltaire’: a label they used as shorthand for hostility to Christianity and writing ‘philosophic’ history.² Gibbon’s attitude to Christianity we shall consider presently. But what was ‘philosophic’ history, and what did it mean to be a ‘philosophic’ historian?

Gibbon’s first published work, the Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761), includes the comment that ‘if philosophers are not always historians, it were, at any rate, to be wished that historians were always philosophers’ (MW, iv. 66: my translation). For Gibbon, the philosophic historian was never a mere chronicler, content to trace the fluid surface of the past. Where the naïive would see only randomness, and a believer the workings of divine providence, the philosophic historian saw order and regularity: ‘History is to a philosophical mind what play was to the Marquis de Dangeau. He would see a system, relations, connections, where others would pick out only the caprices of Fortune. This science is the science of causes and effects’ (MW, iv. 63).

But what kind of causes did the philosophic historian perceive? In the first place, philosophic historiography was secular in its focus. Human agency accomplished everything, although not in the way that the actors themselves intended. So the philosophic historian did not offer explanations of the past which depended on a minute and particular divine providence. Secondly, philosophic historiography was not heroic; it would not depict the lives of millions being determined by the masterful will of a single actor. Indeed, in philosophic histories those actors would tend to emerge as deluded and even defeated figures: the instruments of a past they imagined they were directing, the inhabitants of a realm of illusion blinded to the causes ordering their own lives. Thirdly, the sequences of human society would typically appear oxymoronic, as developments arose from the actions of individuals and the policies of institutions apparently repugnant or antagonistic to them.

So much for the intellectual style of the philosophic historians; what can we say of the content of their historical vision? The historical problems which preoccupied them had, by the time Gibbon composed The Decline and Fall