Volume 35, Number 16 · October 27, 1988
The Lost Moments of History
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
The lost moments of history—I owe that phrase to the most stimulating and original historian of ideas, the late Dame Frances Yates. It comes in her book on the Valois tapestries, the great series of tapestries, now in Florence, which were woven about 1580 for Catherine de Médicis, queen mother of France, the tormented France of the Wars of Religion. They were woven in the Netherlands, then in revolt against Spain, and Dame Frances believed that they were presented to the Queen by William of Orange, the leader of that revolt. In this she seems to have been mistaken, but that, for my purpose, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that, whether those tapestries directly recorded it or not, there was at that time a great 'moment,' that is—for the word is used here in its strict classical sense—a great turning point, in the history of Europe: a point at which the struggle in the Netherlands seemed to be resolved. That moment followed the conclusion of the so-called Pacification of Ghent in 1576.
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