John Lothrop Motley

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John Lothrop Motley : biography

15. April 1814 – 29. May 1877

Partly owing to this essay, Motley was appointed United States minister to the Austrian Empire in 1861, a position which he filled with distinction, working with other American diplomats such as John Bigelow and Charles Francis Adams to help prevent European intervention on the side of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. He resigned this position in 1867., following a political dispute with Secretary of State William H. Seward. Two years later he was sent to represent his country as Ambassador to the United Kingdom, but in November 1870 he was recalled by President Grant. Motley had angered Grant when he completely disregarded Secretary of State Hamilton Fish’s carefully drafted orders regarding settlement of the Alabama Claims. After a short visit to the Netherlands, he again went to live in England, where the Life and Death of John Barneveld, Advocate of Holland : with a View of the Primary Causes and Movements of the Thirty Years War appeared in two volumes in 1874. Ill health now began to interfere with his literary work, and he died at Frampton Court, near Dorchester, Dorset, leaving three daughters. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London.

Notes

Dutch history

In about 1846 he had begun to plan a history of the Netherlands, in particular the period of the United Provinces, and he had already done a large amount of work on this subject when, finding the materials at his disposal in the United States inadequate, he went with his wife and children to Europe in 1851. The next five years were spent at Dresden, Brussels and The Hague in investigation of the archives, which resulted in 1856 in the publication of The Rise of the Dutch Republic, which became very popular. It speedily passed through many editions, was translated into French, Dutch, German and Russian. In 1860 Motley published the first two volumes of its continuation, The United Netherlands. This work was on a larger scale, and embodied the results of a still greater amount of original research. It was brought down to the truce of 1609 by two additional volumes, published in 1867.

The reception of Motley’s work in The Netherlands itself was not wholly favorable, especially as Motley described the Dutch struggle for independence in a flattering light, which caused some to argue he was biased against their opponents. Historians like the orthodox Protestant Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (whom Motley extensively quotes in his work) viewed him very favorably. However, the eminent liberal Dutch historian Robert Fruin, (who was inspired by Motley to do some of his own best work), and who had reported already in 1856 in the "Westminster Review" Motley’s edition on the "Rise of the Dutch republic", was critical of Motley’s tendency to make up "facts" if they made for a good story. Though he admired Motley’s gifts as an author, and stated that he continued to hold the work as a whole in high regard, he stressed it still required "addition and correction".See Fruin’s discussions of Motley’s work in R. Fruin, "Motley’s Geschiedenis der Vereenigde Nederlanden", in: De Gids. Jaargang 1862 (1862) and The humanist historian Johannes van Vloten was very critical however, and responded to Fruin in the introduction to his Nederlands opstand tegen Spanje 1575-1577 (1860): "…about the proper appreciation of Motley’s work (…) I agree less with your too favorable judgement. (…) We cannot build on Motley[‘s foundation]; for that — apart from the little he copied from Groen’s Archives and Gachard’s Correspondances — for that his views are generally too obsolete." , (1860) I, III. Although appreciating his efforts to make Dutch history known among an English-speaking audience, Van Vloten argues that Motley’s lack of knowledge of the Dutch language prevented him from sharing the latest insights of the Dutch historiographers, and made him vulnerable to bias in favor of Protestants and against Catholics.

Motley as historian

Motley’s merits as an historian are undeniably great. He told the story of a stirring period in the history of the world with full attention to the character of the actors and strict fidelity to the vivid details of the action, but his writing is best where most unvarnished, and probably no writer of his calibre has owed less to the mere sparkle of highly polished literary style. He was the first foreign historian to write a major history of the Dutch Republic. In 3500 pages he crafted a literary masterpiece that was translated into numerous languages; his dramatic story reached a wide audience in the 19th century. Motley relied heavily on Dutch scholarship and immersed himself in the sources. His style no longer attracts readers, and scholars have moved away from his simplistic dichotomies of good versus evil, Dutch versus Spanish, Catholic versus Protestant, freedom versus authoritarianism. His theory of causation over-emphasized ethnicity as an unchanging characteristic, exaggerated the importance of William of Orange, and gave undue importance to the issue religious tolerance.

An edition of his historical works was published in nine volumes in London in 1903–1904. See the Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, edited by George William Curtis (New York, 1889); Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., John Lothrop Motley, a Memoir (Boston, 1878); and John Lothrop Motley and his Family: Further Letters and Records (1910), edited by his daughter, Mrs Susan St John Mildmay.