More serious altogether was the interest he took in the psycho-pathology of charlatanry. This seems to have begun when the bigamist and bogus clergyman Robert Peters crossed Trevor-Roper's path in 1958 and then moved on, leaving behind him "a trail of forged documents, deserted wives and unpaid bills". His interest piqued, Trevor-Roper became "a connoisseur of fraud":
Peters's antics provided a source of repeated entertainment, exposing the gullibility of academic and religious institutions across the world.
That connoisseurship was strengthened and deepened in 1973 by Trevor-Roper's involvement with the life and memoirs of the exotic sinologist, fraud and fantasist, Sir Edmund Backhouse, eventually written up and published in 1976 as A Hidden Life: The Enigma of Sir Edmund Backhouse. Backhouse, who between 1913 and 1921 had given the Bodleian a sumptuous collection of (apparently genuine) Chinese books and manuscripts, had died in 1944. Trevor-Roper had been offered his papers by an intermediary in circumstances of clandestine drama, the "drop" being made at Basle airport. On inspection, these papers turned out to be a deeply obscene and explicit narrative of bisexual indulgence conducted at the pinnacle of Manchu society. One of Backhouse's conquests had, allegedly, been the Empress Dowager herself. But the more Trevor-Roper inquired into the life and activities of Backhouse, the more his doubts were raised. Backhouse, it became increasingly clear, had been "a forger, a fraud, a charlatan of epic proportions, who had bamboozled distinguished scholars and librarians, cynical journalists, hard-headed Scottish and American businessmen, senior diplomats, generals and politicians". But Trevor-Roper concluded that Backhouse had himself been taken in by his fictions:
Backhouse's behaviour could not be explained simply in terms of mercenary motives. Rather, he was a fantasist, for whom the line between reality and lies had become blurred.
The Sobieski-Stuarts who claimed to be the descendants of the Young Pretender Charles Edward Stuart, but who had been born John and Charles Allen in no more regal a place than Egham, Surrey, were other examples of the type who had engaged Trevor-Roper's interest when he was researching the Scotch fondness for embracing groundless myths about their past.
But the final instance of Trevor-Roper's involvement with fraud and charlatanry came with the Hitler diaries, in which he was fated to assume, not his accustomed roles of perpetrator or detective, but rather that of victim. Sisman offers a balanced and detailed account of this notorious episode, which gives sympathetic consideration to the circumstances which led to the terrible blunder of authentication (including what looks like deliberate deception by the representatives of Stern magazine), but which stops well short of exoneration. The most terrible vignette of the book is Trevor-Roper's stepson discovering the historian, a week after the scandal had broken, "lying in the foetal position on a bed in a spare room, his face turned to the wall".
That Trevor-Roper did not succumb for long to despair is, in its way, a tribute to the habits of emotional repression and concealment in which he had been schooled by his parents. It is interesting to imagine what he must have felt when as an adolescent he read this passage from The Fair Haven:
Should the father be kind, considerate, full of the warmest love, fond of showing it, and reserved only about his displeasure, the child, having learned to look upon God as his Heavenly Father through the Lord's Prayer and our Church Services, will feel towards God as he does towards his own father; this conception will stick to a man for years and years after he has attained manhood — probably it will never leave him. For all children love their fathers and mothers, if these last will only let them; it is not a little unkindness that will kill so hardy a plant as the love of a child for its parents.
