Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the greatest work of history in English. Born at Putney in 1737, he was a sickly only surviving child of seven, educated erratically, and spent fourteen months at Magdalen College, Oxford, which he described as the most idle and unprofitable of his life. At sixteen he converted to Catholicism after reading Bossuet, which barred him from university and public office. His father sent him to Lausanne to lodge with a Calvinist minister, and he reconverted within eighteen months. He spent five years there, became more fluent in French than English, and read the classics systematically. He fell in love with Suzanne Curchod, and his father refused consent. He recorded that he sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son; she later married Jacques Necker, the French finance minister. He served in the Hampshire militia for two and a half years, which he said taught him something about armies that was useful to a historian of the legions. He dated the idea to 15 October 1764, sitting among the ruins of the Capitol while barefoot friars sang vespers in the temple of Jupiter. The first volume appeared in 1776 and sold out immediately. Chapters fifteen and sixteen, which explain the rise of Christianity in secular terms and question the number of martyrs, provoked a long controversy he answered once and then ignored. Six volumes were completed by 1788. He sat in parliament for eight years without ever speaking. He died in 1794 of complications from an enormous untreated hydrocele.

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