Conyers Read

Background

Conyers Read was born on April 25, 1881 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Franklin Read, a textile manufacturer, and Victoria Eliza Conyers.

Education

He attended Central High School in Philadelphia and then entered Harvard, where he earned the B. A. (1903), M. A. (1904), and Ph. D. in history (1908). Before taking the Harvard doctorate, he spent two years (1903 - 1905) at Oxford University (Balliol), earning a B. Litt (awarded in 1909).

Career

During 1908-1909 he did research work in several London archives and libraries. In January 1911 Read became a history instructor at the University of Chicago, where he spent the next decade.

He rose steadily through the academic ranks, reaching a full professorship in 1919. At the outbreak of World War I, he suffered from the deafness that afflicted him for the rest of his life, but he never allowed it to interfere with his work.

Hence during the war he served with the Red Cross in Brittany. Upon returning to the United States, Read took up an active role in the family textile mill, William F. Read and Sons, of which he had been a director since his father's death in 1916. Successively vice-president, general manager, and president of the mill, Read was responsible for a business that employed some 500 workers and operated 430 looms. He once said of his business career, "I was never really keen about it and therefore never very good at it. " The business declined and was liquidated in 1933, the year Read became executive secretary of the American Historical Association, then a part-time post that lasted until 1941.

In 1934 he was appointed professor of English history at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the late 1930's Read became increasingly concerned about the threat of German aggression. He chaired the Philadelphia branch of the Committee for the Defense of America by Aiding the Allies.

During World War II, he served in Colonel William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan's Research and Analysis Branch, which was soon transformed into the Office of Strategic Services. Read was chief of the British Empire Section and a member of the Board of Analysts in the OSS. After his return to academic life, he organized and chaired the Philadelphia branch of the Council on Foreign Relations.

He continued to teach at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1951; in 1949 he had become president of the American Historical Association. Read first became interested in history as a schoolboy. He went to Harvard to study it; the same impulse took him to Oxford. There he found a world so attractive that it was "near making an Englishman of me. "

His lifelong admiration and affection for England and Englishmen gave direction to his scholarship. While at Oxford he began work on a biography of Sir Francis Walsingham, secretary of state and effectually foreign minister to Elizabeth I. As early as 1909 Read edited the Bardon papers (a collection concerning the trial of Mary Queen of Scots), but it was not until 1925 that his three-volume Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth was published.

It was the most considerable piece of work on Elizabethan history since James Anthony Froude published his multivolume history of the mid-Tudor years; and it placed Read in the front rank of historians of England. Based on a sweeping command of all the manuscript sources and a meticulous use of evidence, it remains the magisterial study of English foreign policy in the crisis years before the Armada. It was followed by Bibliography of British History, Tudor Period, 1485-1603 (1933), a comprehensive and authoritative compilation.

At the time of his retirement he had begun work on another massive biography - that of William Cecil, Lord Burghley; the first volume appeared in 1955, and the second and final volume was complete although not in print when he died.

Read's career was an interesting blend of the nineteenth-century tradition of the gentleman-scholar and that of the twentieth-century academic professional. Relatively easy circumstances made it possible for him to spend a number of years at the beginning of his adult life immersing himself in the archival materials of Elizabethan history.

Characteristically his first major work was published during the years when he was away from academia and fully involved in business. But Read's standards as an historian were rigorous.

His works are rich, indeed exhaustive, in information but sparing and cautious in synthetic judgments.

Only in his shorter work, The Tudors (1936), did he offer more sweeping judgments about the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, as he made clear in his presidential address of 1949, Read had a strong sense of the historian's social responsibility to his own age and to its problems.

No historian was entitled to use his studies of the past as an excuse for withdrawal from the world.

He practiced his preaching in his own career during World War II.

Achievements

• A professor of history at the universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania, he was president of the American Historical Association for the year 1949–1950. In World War I Read served with the American Red Cross and in World War II he joined the Office of Strategic Services.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Tudors: Personalities and Practical Politics in Sixteenth Century England

    (British Isles; Civilization; England; Europe; Great Brita...)

  • The Bardon Papers, Documents Relating to the Imprisonment & Trial of Mary Queen of Scots, Vol. 17 (Classic Reprint)

    (Serjeant Puckering snotes ox the case against Marv Stuart...)

  • The University of Chicago War Papers, Vol. 6: England and America (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The University of Chicago War Papers, Vol. 6...)

  • The Bardon Papers, Vol. 17: Documents Relating to the Imprisonment Trial of Mary Queen of Scots (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Bardon Papers, Vol. 17: Documents Relati...)

  • READ C LORD BURGHLEY & Q.ELIZABETH-JC

    (1965 paper back. ex library with usual stamps and where c...)

Personality

He rightly boasted that he had read every scrap of paper that Cecil had written. He was meticulous in trying to exclude his biases and preoccupations from his reconstruction of the English past.

Read was a strong and self-assured person, a reflection of his wider experience in business and government. Endowed with a salty wit, he was forthright in speech and writing. He was a teacher much admired, who commanded the fullest respect and loyalty of his students, for he treated them as apprentices in a great art and as future colleagues in a serious enterprise.

Connections

He married Edith Coulson Kirk of Philadelphia on June 10, 1910, at the end of his first year as an instructor in history at Princeton. They had three children.

His first wife died in 1937, and on March 25, 1939, he married Evelyn Plummer Braun, who later became a collaborator in his books.

Father:

William Franklin Read

A textile manufacturer

Mother:

Victoria Eliza Conyers

Spouse:

Edith Coulson Kirk

Spouse:

Evelyn Plummer Braun