Picture it.
Rome. Late afternoon. October 15th, 1764.
A young Englishman is sitting among the ruins of the Capitol.
Broken columns. Fallen stones. The wreckage of what had once been the most powerful empire on earth.
And there’s a sound.
Singing.
Barefoot friars chanting their evening prayers.
Christian prayers. In what had once been a pagan temple.
And suddenly the young Englishman has an idea.
Not a little idea.
An enormous idea.
A colossal idea.
An idea that’s going to occupy him for the next twenty-three years.
He’s going to write the history of how Rome fell.
Not just a city. Not just an empire.
A civilisation.
And here’s the delicious thing.
This young man, sitting there in Rome, contemplating the wreckage of the ancient world, is a Londoner.
His name is Edward Gibbon.
And today, October 15th, is the anniversary of that extraordinary moment.
Or at least, that’s how Gibbon remembered it.
He wrote:
“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.”
What a scene.
The old gods have gone. Their temples are ruins. And the Christians are singing among the ruins of the civilisation that once persecuted them.
There, in a single image, is the whole great sweep of history.
And Gibbon sees it.
Now, historians have their doubts about whether the idea really arrived in one blinding flash on that particular afternoon.
Memory is a wonderful thing. Especially when you’re writing your autobiography.
But never mind.
It’s a magnificent story.
And it gave us one of the greatest works of history ever written.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Six volumes.
Published between 1776 and 1788.
A monumental achievement.
And the man who wrote it began life as a sickly little boy in Putney.
Born on April 27th, 1737.
His father was a Member of Parliament. His grandfather had made a fortune, lost most of it in the South Sea Bubble, and then made another fortune.
There’s a certain family talent for rise and fall there, isn’t there?
But young Edward was a frail child.
Six younger brothers and sisters died in infancy.
His mother died when he was ten.
His great good fortune was his aunt, Catherine Porten.
She looked after him. Encouraged his reading. Put books into his hands.
And that changed everything.
Gibbon would later describe reading as the pleasure and glory of his life.
He went to Westminster School.
Hated it.
Called it “a cavern of fear and sorrow”.
I like quoting that when I take my Old Westminster walkers through Westminster School precincts.
But so much for Westminster School. When the boy Gibbon was fifteen, he was sent to Oxford.
But that was scarcely better.
One tutor, Gibbon observed, remembered perfectly well that he had a salary to receive.
He simply forgot that he had a duty to perform.
Ouch.
You can already hear the future Gibbon sharpening his pen.
But there was worse to come.
Young Edward converted to Roman Catholicism.
In eighteenth-century Protestant England, that was a family catastrophe.
His father was horrified.
So he packed the boy off to Switzerland.
Lausanne.
And there, under the guidance of a Protestant minister, Gibbon returned to Protestantism.
He also learned French, improved his Latin, immersed himself in history and literature, met Voltaire, and fell in love.
The young woman was Suzanne Curchod.
Pretty. Intelligent. Accomplished.
Gibbon wanted to marry her.
His father said no.
And Gibbon gave us another of those wonderfully polished sentences.
“I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.”
Oh, Edward.
Not exactly Romeo and Juliet, is it?
But it’s a beautiful line.
And Suzanne went on to marry the wealthy French financier Jacques Necker.
Their daughter would become the celebrated writer Madame de Staël.
Now we come to the Grand Tour.
Paris. Switzerland. Florence.
And finally Rome.
October 15th, 1764.
The ruins. The friars. The idea.
But having an idea is one thing.
Writing six volumes is quite another.
And this is where London comes back into the story.
In 1772 Gibbon established himself in a handsome house in Bentinck Street, near Cavendish Square.
Number 7.
Marylebone.
There’s a blue plaque marking the site today.
And here’s a lovely London Walks connection.
Bentinck Street is right up ou alley on our Old Marylebone walk.
So when we’re exploring that wonderful part of London, we’re walking through the neighbourhood where arguably the greatest works of history ever written took shape.
Rome supplied the inspiration.
Marylebone supplied the writing desk.
Not a bad division of labour.
And it pleases me no end that the greatest work of history ever written was hammered out in a London street.
Not by some remote, dusty scholar in an ivory tower.
But by a sociable London gentleman.
A clubman.
A dinner-party guest.
A Member of Parliament.
A man who liked good company, good conversation, good food.
And liked rather more of the last of those than was entirely good for him.
He belonged to Samuel Johnson’s famous Club.
He frequented Boodle’s.
He was a familiar figure in fashionable London society.
And all the while, he was writing.
Reading.
Thinking.
Making notes.
Revising.
And revising again.
Here’s something I particularly admire.
Gibbon didn’t simply sit down and let the prose pour out.
He worked at it.
He wrote the first chapter three times.
The second and third chapters twice.
He was searching for exactly the right voice.
And goodness, did he find it.
Because Gibbon’s sentences are something else.
They’re not little sentences.
They’re great architectural constructions.
Columns and arches. Balances and counterbalances.
You can almost imagine Christopher Wren building one.
Let me give you a taste.
This is the opening of his great history.
“In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”
Listen to that.
The balance.
“The fairest part of the earth.”
“The most civilized portion of mankind.”
The words seem to march in step.
Like Roman
[LEE-juh-nuh-reez] legionaries.
And then comes a sentence I particularly relish.
“Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.”
Just listen to the sting in that.
“Enjoyed and abused.”
Two little words.
And they tell you an enormous amount about Gibbon’s view of civilisation.
Prosperity is wonderful.
But prosperity can make people soft.
Comfortable. Complacent.
A civilisation may possess extraordinary wealth and power, and still carry within itself the seeds of its own undoing.
That’s the genius of Gibbon.
He’s telling you what happened.
But he’s also making you think about why it happened.
And perhaps even making you wonder whether it could happen again.
Now, Gibbon wasn’t simply mourning the loss of the Roman Empire.
Quite the contrary.
He could admire Roman civilisation while being decidedly sceptical about the business of conquering other peoples and ruling them against their will.
Nor did he spare Christianity.
His treatment of the early Church caused an almighty row.
Clergymen came after him.
Pamphlets flew.
Pens were sharpened.
Theologians thundered.
Gibbon fought back, not with shouting, but with something altogether more dangerous.
Irony.
Polite. Elegant. Devastating.
The literary equivalent of being run through with a very slender sword.
The first volume came out in London on February 17th, 1776.
And it was a sensation.
The first printing sold out in days.
Imagine that.
A substantial, expensive history of ancient Rome.
Flying off the shelves.
In the very year that Britain was losing its American colonies.
There’s another rise-and-fall story for you.
Gibbon became famous.
And the work went on.
He eventually left London and settled in Lausanne.
There, on a June night in 1787, he wrote the last lines of the last page.
Twenty-three years after that afternoon among the Roman ruins.
He put down his pen.
Went out into his garden.
Walked beneath the acacia trees.
The moon was shining on Lake Geneva.
The mountains were silent.
He was free.
The great labour was finished.
But then a curious sadness overtook him.
He realised he was saying goodbye to an old companion.
His book.
For years it had filled his waking hours.
And now it was done.
There’s something immensely touching about that.
The historian had finished the history.
But his own life was running out.
In 1793 he returned to England to comfort his friend Lord Sheffield, whose wife had died.
And Gibbon himself was desperately ill.
For years he had neglected an enormous swelling caused by a hernia and the accumulation of fluid.
Eventually the surgeons had to intervene.
And even then, apparently, he couldn’t resist a joke.
He asked why a fat man was like a Cornish parliamentary borough.
Answer?
Because he never sees his member.
Yes, really.
That’s Gibbon.
Historian of the Roman Empire.
Member of Parliament.
And still capable of a thoroughly indecorous joke.
He died in London on January 16th, 1794.
In lodgings at 76 St James’s Street.
Not quite fifty-seven years old.
And there’s another London Walks connection.
St James’s Street. That’s territory covered by our Old Palace Quarter walk.
So we’ve got Gibbon at both ends.
Old Marylebone, where he wrote his masterpiece.
The Old Palace Quarter, where he drew his last breath.
And in between, one of the most extraordinary literary achievements in the English language.
Two London walks. One very great Londoner.
He was buried in Sussex, in the church at Fletching, close to his dear friend Lord Sheffield.
But London can claim him.
Born in Putney.
Educated in Westminster.
A London clubman.
A London parliamentarian.
And the author of a monumental book whose first volume was largely written in a house in Marylebone.
And there’s one more lovely London detail.
In 1896, Gibbon became the first historian to receive a London commemorative plaque.
The original house in Bentinck Street has gone, but the plaque marks the site.
You can go there today.
Number 7.
Look up at the plaque.
And think about the man who lived and worked there.
Because that’s one of the things I love about London.
You pass an ordinary-looking building.
A doorway. A window. A stretch of brickwork.
And somewhere behind it is a story that changed the way we understand the world.
Today’s story began among the ruins of Rome.
But it belongs to London, too.
And there’s one last thought.
Gibbon spent twenty-three years explaining how a seemingly invincible empire could disappear.
He understood something that perhaps we all need reminding of.
Nothing lasts for ever.
Not power.
Not wealth.
Not empires.
But sometimes a book does.
London Calling. London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Ok, addendum time. Word of the Day time: Vespers
A lovely word for this particular story.
Vespers comes from the Latin vesper, meaning evening.
It’s the name given to the evening prayer service in the Christian Church.
And that’s what those barefoot friars were singing when Gibbon sat among the Roman ruins.
A word that takes us straight back to the sound, the place and the moment when a great book was conceived.
See you tomorrow.