Edward Gibbon converted to Catholicism at sixteen, and his father exiled him for it
The future historian of Rome's decline was pulled from Oxford within weeks of becoming a Catholic in 1753 and sent to a Protestant pastor in Lausanne. Under threat of disinheritance he converted back on Christmas Day 1754. A decade later, amid the ruins of the Forum, he first imagined his great history.
Gibbon was born in 1737 at Putney, Surrey, the only one of seven children to survive infancy. His grandfather had lost a fortune in the South Sea bubble and largely recovered it, so the family was comfortable. Gibbon remembered himself as a sickly child neglected by his mother, whom he lost around the age of nine; his aunt Catherine Porten, Aunt Kitty, gave him his love of books. By fourteen he was already reading Roman history and volumes of the Universal History.
At Magdalen College, Oxford, he spent fourteen months he later called the most idle and unprofitable of his life. His conversion on 8 June 1753 alarmed his father, who placed him with the Reformed pastor Daniel Pavillard in Lausanne. There he made lifelong friends, including John Baker Holroyd, later Lord Sheffield, and fell for Suzanne Curchod, a pastor's daughter who would marry the French finance minister Jacques Necker and become mother of Madame de Staël. His father forbade the match, and Gibbon summed it up: he sighed as a lover and obeyed as a son. His own story that reading Conyers Middleton triggered the conversion has been challenged by David Womersley as a late addition to his memoirs.
Back in England he published a French essay on literature in 1761 and served as a militia captain in home defence during the Seven Years' War, joking later that commanding Hampshire grenadiers helped him understand the Roman legion. In 1764 he crossed the Alps with his friend William Guise and reached Rome in October, spending days in a kind of rapture before settling to study.
That visit gave him the idea for a history of the city, later widened to the whole empire. Decline and Fall, as the finished work is usually called, appeared in six volumes from 1776 to 1789 and sold well. Readers prized its ironic style and careful use of primary sources, while its attacks on organised religion made it controversial. He died in 1794.
Source: Edward Gibbon
