The author of Nibble the Squirrel is dead. John Elliott's first book, somewhat in the anthropomorphic tradition of Beatrix Potter, appeared when he was barely 16 years old, in 1946. The illustrator was his school friend, Julian Slade, who later achieved fame as the composer of Salad Days. John used to joke that Nibble earned him more money than all his academic books put together. On the surface, at least, it hardly betokened his future greatness as a historian of what he called “Spain and its world”; but neither did hardly anything in his life up to that time.His father, who was employed as headmaster of a small private school in Surrey, had entered him for a King's Scholarship at Eton College, much as he might have with any exceptionally gifted boy. So began John's life in a series of academic hothouses: the scholars' house at Eton, where he shared a roof with some six dozen of the cleverest boys in the British Empire; Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was an undergraduate scholar, frequent prizewinner, research fellow, and, for five years from 1962, university lecturer; King's College London, as a professor from 1968 to 1973; then the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, NJ; and finally the University of Oxford, where he was Regius Professor of Modern History—perhaps the most coveted history chair in the world—from 1990 until his retirement in 1997.Early proclivities did not include any special vocation or aptitude for Spanish studies. Quakerism, no longer formally upheld when John was a child, informed his family's values. Though he came, like William Christian Jr., to embody, as it were, John Bossy's theory of the affinities or mutual sympathy of Catholicism and the tradition of the Society of Friends, he shared—and always evinced—the characteristic qualities of radical English Protestantism: austerity, sobriety, an abhorrence of ostentation, a quiet and unassuming manner, and an unremitting work ethic. On one of John's early visits to Oxford in 1971, to speak to the Stubbs Society, the society's president (by convention, always an undergraduate), acting on common assumptions about Hispanists' tastes, jeopardized the society's finances by ordering the finest wines, only to find that his guest was a total abstainer who would do nothing but modestly sip lemonade.By his own admission John took no interest in Spain until he capriciously joined fellow undergraduates on a tour of Iberia by truck in 1950. Spain captivated him, partly because he perceived what eludes many superficial observers—that Castilian traditional virtues resembled his own—and partly because he warmed to the way that austerity and poverty were no impediment to Spaniards' enjoyment of life. His artistic sensibility—which has eluded most of his obituarists but which was part of the basis of his friendship with Julian Slade—clinched his desire to study the country, especially after a visit to the Prado, where Diego Velázquez's portrait of the conde-duque de Olivares on a rearing stallion focused the young man's attention on a research topic that would occupy many years of his life. This visit led to a biography, The Count-Duke of Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline (1986), that is by universal acclaim one of the masterpieces of modern Spanish historiography.Meanwhile, however, he needed a more manageable project for a doctoral dissertation. There was no suitable supervisor in Cambridge, but he worked under Sir Herbert Butterfield, who, though a notoriously unexigent master, taught him to refrain from moral judgments, to dispense with the delusions of hindsight, and to write history wie es eigentlich gewesen. John settled on the elucidation of one of the most dramatic episodes in Olivares's life, the Catalan revolt of 1640. By dint of great efforts, he learned both Spanish and Catalan, which he spoke with unerring accuracy and into which he would weave amusingly idiomatic phrases. He read the Spanish literature of his period and never hesitated to use literature and art as evidence, but he always insisted that he was a historian and not, strictly speaking, a Hispanist.Like all his subsequent work, the dissertation, published in 1963, demonstrated uncompromising mastery of the sources and attracted attention in Spain for two qualities that he brought to the subject: objectivity, unusual in a region that the Spanish Civil War divided and centralist hostility to Catalanism embittered; and an ability to set Spain in the only context that makes its history intelligible—that of the Europe of which Spain forms part and whose history Spain has shared in every aspect. He was among a stunning generation of foreigners—including two other Englishmen, Raymond Carr and Hugh Thomas, and an American, Stanley Payne—who helped dismantle the myth of a viscerally peculiar culture, warped out of a European trajectory by supposedly Africanizing, Orientalizing, or dogmatically crusading experiences. Contextualization and comparison were always key elements of his technique—he abjured talk of methodology, as of every hierophantic term—especially manifest in Richelieu and Olivares (1984) and Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (2006). By classifying Spain as a composite monarchy he helped to convince Spaniards that their history could be, simultaneously, both distinctive and representative in Europe. His fairness and common sense in the handling of political controversy attracted admiration from every side in Spanish politics and scholarship and made him a sort of adoptive son of the country, garbed in numerous honorary academic robes and encumbered with civil decorations and honors. He uttered judgments only when asked, making clear, for instance, that he was staunchly in favor of cultural Catalanism and political devolution yet unwavering in approval of the continued political unity of Spain. He predicted accurately that the movement for historical memory in the early twenty-first century would be of less service to truth than to conflictive and imprudent political agendas.To the study of subjects shared by readers of HAHR he brought his characteristic freshness of vision, first by treating the Spanish monarchy as a global phenomenon in his textbook, Imperial Spain: 1469–1716 (1963). It appeared almost simultaneously with the first volume of Spain under the Habsburgs (1964) by John Lynch, who was also an impeccable scholar and might have had an advantage as a devout Catholic but whose work did not quite match his rival's fluency and flair. In, among other works, a 1966 paper to the Royal Historical Society titled “The Mental World of Hernán Cortés” and in lectures on “the uncertain impact” of America on Europe, published in 1970 as The Old World and the New, 1492–1650, John Elliott demonstrated how traditional, meticulous reading of documentary evidence with a humanistic eye could add to understanding, even of familiar texts. The new approach to which he became increasingly sympathetic was that of court studies, brilliantly represented in his joint work with Jonathan Brown, A Palace for a King: The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (1980). Nonetheless, he never abandoned the standard but perhaps insufficiently nuanced view of the Spanish monarchy as a precociously bureaucratic state, whereas he might have made more allowance for its courtly, paternalistic, patrimonial, seigneurial, and traditional layers of government. He might be criticized for lack of responsiveness to regional studies and a consequent tendency to overgeneralize on, for instance, the problem of how and why the Spanish monarchy endured for so long. He was also rather selective in taking environmental history into account. Yet one of his great virtues was his modesty; he always remained open to advice, grateful for correction, and alert to other people's ideas. Above all, the author of Nibble the Squirrel had a gift of imagination that a great historian needs: imagination, disciplined by evidence, was essential, he always maintained, both for dialogue amid differences of opinion and for those conversations with the dead that historians conduct in their minds as they interrogate the sources.His character was exemplary: always generous, courteous, painstakingly helpful, incapable of wrath or resentment, and slow to make adverse judgments of others. He was kind even in criticism. He had that gift that an English education, at its best, imparts: he could be devastating without causing offense. At Oxford, he had the reputation of asking penetrating questions at soirees and seminars, leaving speakers flattened yet somehow flattered. His pupils benefited, as the tally of their achievements shows: in the history of the Spanish world, a disproportionate number of leading historians of the next generation studied with him or gained from his informal mentoring. He was a demanding director of research, never accepting any excuse for laggardness or inattention to detail, but always a sagacious and encouraging influence. He coaxed students into renouncing jargon, writing well, and working toward books for publication, not merely theses for examination.He had neither time nor taste for academic politics. He left Princeton for Oxford with profound misgivings, knowing that he was exchanging what he called an academic paradise for an Eden full of human serpents. He had already turned down the offer of the Regius Chair at Cambridge. But he could not refuse a further call to a post that he had not sought but that came to him as a duty he felt he had to fulfill (recognized as such by the award of a knighthood of the United Kingdom, to go with his two Spanish knighthoods, in 1994). And Oxford proved, in practice, a congenial place, highly adapted for teaching and learning. There (until his death in hospital of a chest infection with contributory heart failure on March 10, 2022) he spent a happy and fruitful retirement in his charming and welcoming old stone house in Iffley, in the company of his wife, Oonah, with whom he shared 64 years of marriage and by whom, with his sister, Judith, he is survived.