Vincent Cronin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Vincent Cronin's full name at birth was Vincent Archibald Patrick Cronin, sometimes recorded as Cronogue. He was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, on the 24th of May 1924. His father was A. J. Cronin, a Scottish physician who also wrote novels, and his mother was May Gibson. By the time he was two, the family had left Wales for London. Cronin grew up to spend his career writing about rulers and eras far removed from that Welsh birthplace. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and built a reputation as a historical, cultural and biographical writer. What carried a Welsh-born son of a Scottish novelist into the courts of long-dead monarchs? And why would historians later argue over how seriously to take his books?

• 2. An Uncommon Education

  ›

  Ampleforth College gave Cronin his earliest schooling, well before his university years. From there he went on to Harvard University, then to the Sorbonne in Paris, and finally to Trinity College, Oxford. He graduated from Oxford in 1947 with honours, earning a degree in Literae Humaniores. During the Second World War, Cronin served as a lieutenant in the British Army. He would soon marry and begin a family life that stretched across three countries.

• 3. Three Homes, Five Children

  ›

  In 1949, Cronin married Chantal de Rolland, and together they had five children. The family divided its time between three places: London; Marbella, Spain; and Dragey, near Avranches in Normandy. In Normandy, they lived at the Manoir de Brion. Cronin died at his home in Marbella on the 25th of January 2011. By then, honors and a running scholarly argument about his books had already attached to his name.

• 4. Awards and Harsh Reviews

  ›

  The Richard Hillary Award reached Cronin early in his career. The W. H. Heinemann Award followed in 1955, and the Rockefeller Foundation Award came in 1958. Cronin also contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes and served as the first general editor of the Companion Guides series. He also sat on the council of the Royal Society of Literature. His books sold well, but scholars did not always receive them warmly. Reviewer John T. Alexander described Cronin's Catherine, Empress of All the Russias as a 'facile popularization.' That one review sat atop a bibliography that ranged from a Sicilian travelogue to a life of the Roman emperor Nero.

• 5. A Wide-Ranging Bibliography

  ›

  The Golden Honeycomb: A Sicilian Quest opened Cronin's list of books in 1954, a travel account of Sicily. A year later, The Wise Man from the West told the story of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and his mission to China. In 1957, The Last Migration turned to the Falqani tribe of South Persia. Cronin also translated other writers' work into English. These translations included Alfred Kern's novel L'Amour Profane in 1961 and Jean Danielou and Henri Marrou's The Christian Centuries in 1964. In 1977, he translated Valery Giscard d'Estaing's Towards a New Democracy. Cronin edited guidebooks too, beginning with The Companion Guide to Paris in 1963. Later volumes in the same series covered the West Highlands of Scotland, the North Island of New Zealand, and Florence. His major biographies appeared at a steady pace. Louis XIV came out in 1964, Napoleon in 1971, Louis and Antoinette in 1974, and Catherine, Empress of All the Russias in 1978. The Renaissance drew him back again and again. He published The Florentine Renaissance in 1967, The Flowering of the Renaissance in 1969, and a book titled simply The Renaissance in 1992. His later decades produced two histories of Paris: Paris on the Eve, 1900-1914 in 1989 and Paris: City of Light, 1919-1939 in 1994. Chile Rediscovered followed in 2009. His final book, Nero, appeared in 2010, closing a bibliography that had begun with a travel account of Sicily in 1954.