It was the books I met, of course, not the man himself—the burly, barrel-chested man with the craggy features and brilliant eyes, garbed in his black cloak and black slouch hat—though it might be said that few thinkers have revealed as much of their inner selves as Belloc did on every page he wrote. I was a teen-age student in a preparatory seminary dedicated to the Puer Nazarenus, a place I still revere in memory, not so much for the priestly formation or religious commitment it fostered—a commentary not on the institution’s but, alas, on my own spiritual inadequacies—as for the rich intellectual vistas it opened for me. I may well have belonged to the last generation of Americans to receive a classical education in the English public school tradition: a solid basis of instruction in Latin and Greek, linked to a broad exposure to the best in English and American literature, and supported by an introduction to those talented enough—not me, I’m afraid—to the higher mathematics, to theoretical physics, and to laboratory chemistry.

(This preparatory seminary, incidentally, was housed in an imposingly large and remarkably beautiful building constructed in the Italian style, situated on the shores of a lake which embraced it on three sides. In “the spirit of Vatican II”—surely one of the slipperiest phrases in our contemporary lexicon—it was sold for a pittance by ecclesiastical bureaucrats to a well-meaning group of enthusiastic Protestants who, out of philistine ignorance rather than malice, managed to convert it into a temple of pedestrian ugliness. Thus in one small corner of what was the Catholic world the vestiges of popery were stamped out. A desecration of beauty occurred—not so violently, to be sure, as that perpetrated during the seventeenth century by Oliver Cromwell’s fanatical puritans who, as Hilaire Belloc disdainfully chronicled it, spent themselves systematically smashing the statuary and stained glass in the medieval English cathedrals and profaning the tombs of those buried there—but it was a desecration nonetheless.)

One of the wonderful venues of my prep-school was the wood-paneled library. As I reflect upon it now, it was in fact a rather small room containing only a modest collection of books. But to me, sprung from a blue-collar family barely subsisting during the Great Depression in a clutch of small, drab Minnesota towns, it displayed a peculiar magic and riches beyond dreaming. The library was organized according to the old-fashioned Dewey-Decimal system. As I passed dazzled from one stack of shelves to the next, I came finally to those books catalogued under the number 921. These were the biographies of eminent persons, some of whom I had heard of — Ward’s Life of Newman was there and Freeman’s magisterial study of General Lee—and many others whose names were unknown to me. At random I picked a book from the shelf — it was called Richelieu: A Study. I flipped open the pages, and my adolescent eye fell upon this passage.

Here was a man possessing beyond all other men of his time, and perhaps of centuries, three qualities—each rare, in combination almost unknown: the gift of judging exactly the most complicated situation, in all its details and in right proportion; the gift of persuasion over individuals through a right choice of words and tones and a profound divination of the individual character; the gift of directing a whole policy in its largest outlines as well.

In the course of the half-century since I first read these lines, I have had occasion, as a professional historian, to examine the persona and the career of Cardinal Richelieu, the midwife of the modern centralized state, and never have I found a reason to challenge this judgment of Hilaire Belloc, rendered the year before I was born.

Richelieu was but the earliest of my excursions into the past under Belloc’s guidance. I happily succumbed to the spell of that rhythmic prose, with its nobility of phrase, its grand sweep of description at once cosmic and intimate, its deep perception of human grandeur and human folly, and—perhaps most striking of all—its uncanny capacity to set out the linkages whereby one can see clearly both the forest and the trees. Thus, after recounting Louis XVI’s tryst with the guillotine, Belloc wrote:

So perished the French monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and to recognize its own nature when the vaults of the Thermae echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings. Look up that valley of dead men crowned, and you may see the gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the globe and in his right the hilt of his unconquerable sword.

But it was not just such poetic exuberance that made Belloc’s histories so vibrant. No one had a better sense than he of how important physical place is in understanding human events or more skill in conveying it. He wrote a great deal of military history — ”Battle-history,” he once observed with pardonable exaggeration, “is the only true history in the world: men are then so alive!”—and he never took up his pen until he had walked the battle-field himself. Indeed, he once traveled a sleepless forty-eight hours in third-class railway carriages to the Russian frontier, so that he could reconstruct the exact spot where Napoleon’s grande armee had broken to pieces on its retreat from Moscow.

Yet for all Belloc’s ability to conjure up places his readers had never seen, to draw them into the drama of past human adventure and travail, to delineate for them personalities as varied as Saladin and William III—history, he liked to say, “is the resurrection of the flesh”—there lay at the core of his historical work a vision as hard as a diamond and as unshakable as the mountains he loved to climb.

I desire you to remember that we are Europe; we are a great people. The faith is not an accident among us, nor an imposition, nor a garment; it is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh; it is a philosophy made by and making ourselves. We have adorned, explained, enlarged it; we have given it visible form. This is the service we Europeans have done to God. In return He has made us Christians.

It was only much later, after I had read a good portion of the Belloc opera — his account of English politics during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, his biographies of Danton and Robespierre and other fascinating figures who shared in the cataclysm of the French Revolution, his studies of the individual Stuart kings of England and Scotland—that I began to experience some doubts about his reliability as a chronicler of the past. It was not so much the furious assaults that were leveled against his work by persons who could be reasonably designated as his ideological rivals; he proved himself more than able to deal with such critics. Nor was it in itself an unease at the suspicion that no scholar could claim expertise in so varied an expanse of past events as Belloc confidently did—from the philosophical debates held in ancient Athens to the logistical arrangements adopted by Marshall Foch when he launched the great Allied offensive in the summer of 1918. Misgivings, to be sure, arose in my mind because of what seemed to be Belloc’s studied carelessness about details; so many silly, easily correctable errors of fact tended to spoil the overall effect of the picture he drew, even if few of them were substantive.

But the most glaring difficulty stemmed from Belloc’s stubborn refusal to include in his historical studies any reference to the sources he had employed in putting together his narrative, neither by way of conventional foot- or end-notes nor in a standard bibliography. There is no doubt that this disinclination left Belloc open to reproach not only from his declared enemies but from those who were basically his intellectual allies. Nor was this call for documentation a mere pedantic quibble. The reconstruction of the past can be legitimate only when it is founded upon testimony left behind by witnesses — what historians call “sources”—and one who reads a piece of history has a right to require that the author provide evidence of such testimony. Belloc cavalierly brushed aside such objections, with the simple and obviously inadequate claim that he had studied all the relevant material. When pressed on this conundrum during the 1930s by the young Father Philip Hughes—later the celebrated author of The Reforma tion in England and my own mentor—Belloc replied: “But then I am not an historian. I am a publicist.”

This assertion should not be taken lightly, as though it were merely a way of putting off Hughes’s (or by extension) my own complaint about this aspect of Belloc’s work. He wrote his books, he said, not for the approval of academic historians or indeed for intellectuals generally, but for ordinary people. The validity of such a rejoinder depended, of course, on the definition of “ordinary people,” which meant, for Belloc, the upper middle class from which he himself had come. And speaking of definitions, maybe “publicist,” given its present pejorative connotation, is not quite the right word for us to employ; maybe simply “writer” serves better. For Hilaire Belloc was above all a literary man who flourished during a golden age of print. He produced hundreds of publications, millions of printed words. His earliest books were collections of verse for children, which still, after a hundred years, can charm and delight. As can rollicking lines composed later which showed that the poetic muse never deserted him: “Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,/ Do you remember an Inn?/ And the spreading and the tedding / Of the straw for the bedding,/ And the fleas that tease/ In the high Pyrenees . . . .”

And his best books, the ones for which he will be longest remembered, were not his histories, ad mir able as these latter may be in many respects. Even Danton (1899), the first and best of his biographies, cannot be compared with The Path to Rome (1902), the splendid chronicle of the pilgrimage he made on foot to the Seat of the Apostles, a journey which began in Toul in northeast France (where he had served as a conscript in the French army); nor with The Four Men (1912), the somber, yet lyrical evocation of those southern English counties where the ever-restless Belloc found the only real home he ever had; nor with The Cruise of the Nona (1925), his tribute to the sea—”the common sacrament of the world,” he called it—interspersed with autobiography and commentary on a vast range of subjects; nor, finally, with Belinda (1928), a novel which Belloc described as “a Tale of Affection in Youth and Age” and which summoned up the memory of his beloved wife who had died young and had taken with her a large measure of his joie de vivre.

What then of the histories, composed by the self-styled “publicist?” The word he chose itself points to a factor that cannot be overestimated. Belloc wrote for money to support himself and his family (he had five children). He lived well according to the standards of Edwardian England—there were always servants in his Sussex house, King’s Land, as well as all the do mestic amenities and especially fine wines aplenty; he traveled incessantly; he was prodigiously generous—but he was able to do so only by constant writing and lecturing. He adopted a work-schedule that would soon have killed a man of lesser stamina. In 1909, just short of his fortieth birthday, he expressed in a letter to a friend this unremitting necessity; if the tone was jocular, the substance was deadly serious.

I received a telegram this morning from Glasgow saying, “Could you lecture on travel?” I will lecture on the Proper Method of Milking a Cow, which I have never done, or on Mowing a Field, which I can do jolly well. I will lecture on the Influence of the Jesuits on Europe, or on the Influence of Europe on the Jesuits. I will lecture in verse, like Milton, or in alternate verse, like Apuleius in the theater of Carthage. I will lecture on anything in any manner for money, and don’t you forget it. I can lecture twice a day or three times. I can lecture on my hand, on my head, or between my legs, or with the dumb alphabet.

The bitterest and most abiding disappointment of Belloc’s life was the refusal of any of the colleges at Oxford—he had been an undergraduate at Balliol, and he loved and revered the university—to offer him a position. He always maintained that had he enjoyed a secure and regular income, and the learned leisure to be found within the precincts of academe, the quality of his work would have been much enhanced. There seems little reason to doubt this avowal. As it was, Hiliare Belloc the historian dwelt in Grub Street, where little time or energy could be expended on checking details or citing sources.

But even more significantly, Belloc’s histories must be judged within the context of two core principles. The first of these was that the breakdown of medieval Christendom at the time of the Protestant Reformation had inevitably led to a disintegration of European, and particularly of English, political institutions. The aristocracy that had emerged out of the spoliation of the Church by Henry VIII had evolved into a plutocracy which controlled capital and indeed all the means of production and so deprived the common man of his independence and dignity. Representative democracy, as practiced in Britain and elsewhere, was a snare and a delusion, because the political parties—Belloc himself had been elected twice to the House of Commons as a Liberal—were merely the creatures of the monied interests. Only the reallocation of physical resources—hence the awkward term “Distributism”—could re store the craftsman, the small merchant, the self-reliant farmer to the autonomy without which there could not be a healthy society.

Allied to this distributist ideal, and indeed fundamental to all Belloc’s thought, was his conviction that the Catholic religion had been the prime instrument in the formation of European culture. And as he traced in his books and pamphlets and lectures the step-by-step triumph of the vulgar and greedy plutocrats over the time-span since the Reformation, he invariably found this catastrophe to be rooted in the systematic de struction of Catholicism, especially in “England’s green and pleasant land.” His argument was remorseless and, though it may have been sometimes overstated, it nevertheless succeeded in forcing a salutary corrective upon reluctant academic historians, with all their Protestant, capitalist, and imperialist prejudices. For this notable intellectual achievement all persons of good will remain in Hilaire Belloc’s debt.

“I am by all my nature skeptical,” Belloc wrote Chesterton on the occasion of the latter’s conversion. “But when religious doubt assails me,” he continued, “I discover it to be false; a mood, not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.” His religion was neither sentimental nor mystical. Indeed, when urged to read an essay on St. John of the Cross, “[I] found the whole thing repulsive.” And, as his biographer records, “if a priest took more than twenty minutes over his Mass he suspected him of Modernism.” Catholicism was “a thing, not a theory. It.”

So Hilaire Belloc the Catholic lived, and so he died. Flawed historian he may have been, but he played the role of prophet—spokesman, that is, for a message greater than himself—to perfection. How appropriate, therefore, that Monsignor Ronald Knox chose the following text from Jeremiah for the sermon he preached at the memorial service for Belloc at Westminster Cathedral in August, 1953: “Up then, gird thee like a man, and speak out all the message I give thee. Meet them undaunted, and they shall have no power to daunt thee. Strong I mean to make thee this day as fortified city, or pillar of iron, or wall of bronze, to meet king, prince, priest, and common fold all the country through.”