The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes
novel about Frederick von Hardenberg, the Romantic poet Novalis. The picture of the close-knit, brilliantly clever family of the Von Hardenbergs, although they are late-eighteenth-century members of the German aristocracy, bears considerable resemblance to the Knoxes.
It was this last book that bore an epigraph from Novalis himself, which Penelope Fitzgerald said she had come to love. ‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.’ But perhaps it could also be said, that novels sometimes arise out of the impulses of biography.
IN THIS BOOK I HAVE DONE MY BEST to tell the story of my father and his three brothers. All four of them were characteristically reticent about themselves, but, at the same time, most unwilling to let any statement pass without question. I have tried to take into account both their modesty and their love of truth, and to arrive at the kind of biography of which they would have approved.
When I was very young I took my uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else in the world was not like them. Later on I found that this was not so, and eventually I began to want to make some kind of record of their distinctive attitude to life, which made it seem as though, in spite of their differences, they shared one sense of humour and one mind. They gave their working lives to journalism, cryptography, classical scholarship, the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church. Since I wrote this book twenty-three years ago all these professions, all these worlds, have changed. If the four of them could be reborn into the twenty-first century, how would it treat them? I can only be certain that they would stand by the (sometimes unexpected) things they said. Evoe, my father, muttered to me, on the way to my wedding, “The only thing I want is for everyone, as far as possible, to be happy.” Dillwyn: “Nothing is impossible.” Wilfred: “Get on with it”—also “Why should we not go on, through all eternity, growing in love and in our power to love?” Ronnie: “Do the most difficult thing.” I miss them all more than I can say.
I should never have got any way at all without the help and encouragement of my family, and the notes, letters and photographs which they lent me. I should like to begin by thanking my stepmother, Mary Knox, for all that she did, my brother, Rawle Knox, and my cousins Christopher and Oliver Knox, Tony Peck and Julian Peck.
Lord Oxford and Asquith most kindly let me use the large collection of unpublished material collected by the late Evelyn Waugh for his biography of Ronald Knox; to that brilliantly discreet work, and to the collection itself, I owe a very great deal. The bibliography of Ronald Knox’s published works, which he believed had grown too complicated even for the Recording Angel, has now been undertaken by Miss Patricia Cowan, who was good enough to lend me her copy.
I feel very real gratitude to Dr Alec Vidler, who found time to answer all my inquiries about Wilfred Knox, and to Professor Henry Chadwick, for his most helpful letter about Wilfred and The Sources of the Synoptic Gospels; to the late General Gustave Bertrand, who explained to me the early stages in the solving of Enigma; to Professor Gilbert Waterhouse and Professor W. H. Bruford, who told me about Room 40; to Mavis Batey, Helen Morris, Margaret Rock, and Peter Twinn, who most kindly and patiently re-created for me the strange world of Bletchley Park; to Richard Price, the historian of Punch; to Professor W. G. Arnott of Leeds University, and to Mr I. C. Cunningham, the most recent editor of Herodas; to the late Rev. Meredith Dewey, Dean of Pembroke; to David Kahn, the authority on codes and ciphers; to Malcolm Muggeridge, who knew all four of the brothers and was able to give me a detached opinion; to the late Dr A. N. L. Munby and the staff of King’s College Library, who let me read the unpublished autobiography of Nathaniel Wedd; to Mr P. J. Law, the librarian of Corpus, who showed me Dr Fowler’s letter-book, and to Dr John Lake, who made mathematics seem simple.
I should also like to take the opportunity to thank the following people, who, simply out of their affectionate memories of one or other of the Knoxes, wrote to me and helped me in many different ways: Canon Jack Bagley, O.G.S., Mr Ian Bailey (Manchester Grammar School), the Hon. Mrs Vera Birch, Canon Henry Brandreth, O.G.S., Mrs Susan Brooksbank, Mrs Patricia Chambers, Mrs Dorothy Collins, Mr John Cooper (Trinity College Library), Mr J. J. Creaven, the Very Rev. Horace Dammers, Dean of Bristol, Mr Robin Denniston, Mr Humphrey Ellis, Mr Laurence Elvin (Lincolnshire History and Tennyson Collection), Professor Herbert Farmer, the Rev. John Gillings, Mr Harry Golombek, Mrs Bridget Grant, Mr J. Green (Borough Librarian of Newham), Canon George Handisyde, Professor and Mrs Edgar Lobel, Canon Murray Macdonald, Mr Iain Mackenzie, Mr Leslie Marsh, Mr Hugh Mead (Librarian of St. Paul’s School), Miss Dionys Moore, Mrs Elsie Moseley (who remembers being chased round the lawn at Edmundthorpe by my uncles when they were all very small children), Dr Joseph Needham, the Rev. J. C. Neil-Smith, Mr Bernard Palmer (editor of the Church Times), Mr Pepys-Whiteley (Deputy Keeper, Magdalene College Library), the Rev. Richard Rawstorne, Mr Gilbert Spencer, R.A., Canon Robert Symonds, O.G.S., Canon George Tibbatts, O.G.S., Mr George Wansbrough, Mr Auberon Waugh, Mr Patrick Wilkinson. I am most grateful to Richard Garnett of Macmillan, who helped me through so many difficulties.
Finally, for this new edition I should like to thank Christopher Carduff for his energy, inspiration and patience.
Penelope Fitzgerald
15 March 2000
THIS IS THE STORY OF FOUR BROTHERS who were born into the family of a Victorian vicarage. When, seventy years later, the eldest was asked to consider writing his life, he declined, but suggested the title: Must We Have Lives? If we must, and if we want to understand them, we need to go back two or three generations.
The family was descended from landed settlers in Ulster, the Knoxes of Edentrellick, Rathmullen, Moneymore and Prehen. At the end of the eighteenth century the head of the Edentrellick branch, Alexander Knox, surrounded by his twenty-six children, set his face firmly against change. Although he and his descendants were Presbyterians, and suffered from the same political disabilities as the Catholics, he disapproved profoundly of the United Irishmen, who were hoping, by means of a somewhat amateurish rebellion, to establish a republic. Several of the family were implicated in the rising, and were wounded, disgraced, disowned, or, as the old man put it, “lived to be hanged”. But one of the sons, George, steered clear of trouble altogether, and went to try his fortune in the West Indies. This George was to become the great-grandfather of the four Knox brothers.
Having a hardheaded Ulster business sense, George acquired a sugar plantation and later recommended himself to the Governor, General Nugent, who was of illegitimate birth and always ready to help those who helped themselves. He returned to Ireland only once in the next ten years, to marry Laetitia Greenfield, the daughter of Angel Atkinson, of the Moneymore branch. Angel, who wrote that she was “waiting till it was God’s pleasure to dismiss her soul from its frail habitation”, was sickly, and George no doubt hoped, when she died, to inherit some more of the Knox property. Back in London, he set up as a merchant in Henrietta Street. The next prospects were to be the begetting of a numerous family, and the Moneymore inheritance. But everything went amiss: the property passed to a cousin, and Laetitia proved as delicate as her mother. She bore two sons—George in 1814, Alexander in 1818—then died, a few days later, of childbed fever.
To the four-year-old elder son it was a cruel shock. One of his books survives, a little leather-bound Tasso from his schooldays, with a Latin inscription: “This book was my mother’s, my loved, my long-lost mother’s.” The words come as something of a surprise in the history of the shrewd and so far dislikeable family. With poor Laetitia, the Knoxes acquired the beginnings of tenderheartedness.
Against all expectation, young George’s father turned away from him and lavished all his affection on the second son, who had innocently caused his mother’s death. What was left of the West Indian properties was settled on Alexander; everything was for Alexander.
Tempers blazed high when George refused to sit under a Presbyterian minister. His mother had