The history of the historical profession in Britain has become a significant field of historical study since the late 1970s, with intellectual history its key precision tool. The latter profited from the progressive discrediting of what Michael Bentley has characterized as the ‘modernist’ turn in the discipline for much of the twentieth century. In a spirited and absorbing study of this reigning ‘persuasion’ between the 1890s and the 1970s, Bentley highlights the priority that modernists gave to documents – particularly those concerning the public life of nations – as the raw material of history. Documents supplied the historian's intellectual letters of credit to a far greater extent than previously, free from conceptual and epistemological anxieties about the limits of historical knowledge (p. 209). The history of ideas and culture were sidelined as mere epiphenomena of events in diplomatic and political history. For the greater part of his life this conception of their dependency was held by Herbert Butterfield, at least, despite his own substantial accomplishments as an historian of ideas (McIntire, pp. 354–5). Furthermore, in so far as historians regarded themselves as simply impersonal agents of historical truth, there seemed no reason to turn the spotlight of historical research inwards (Bentley, p. 13). As the modernists' heyday drew to a close, fatally weakened by postmodernist epistemologies developing elsewhere, new space opened up for studies of the practice of history. The wealth of insight in the four books under review emphasizes the crucial role that personal, cultural, and professional mindsets have played in modernist, no less than ‘pre-modernist’ or ‘whig’ history writing. Indeed, these studies reinforce a recent claim that all historical knowledge is the history of ideas, not just in R. G. Collingwood's sense of the re-enactment of the past at the level of thought but also of each re-enactment as an idea that constitutes an historical event itself.Footnote ¹

The first wave of interest in historians as actors in history themselves as the grip of modernism relaxed focused upon what may loosely be called the whigs and their immediate challengers. Macaulay, Stubbs, Froude, and J. R. Green, on the one hand, Maitland, Tout, and Pollard, on the other, became serious objects of historiographical interest in works by P. B. M. Blaas, John Burrow, and Rosemary Jann.Footnote ² But attention to the wider ‘modernist’ movement which one of these earlier scholars – Blaas – believed had defeated whiggism fairly conclusively by the time of the First World War, and particularly its role in shaping the method of historians for much of the twentieth century, has waited upon full ingestion of accounts of the whig episode. By this time modernism itself was in an advanced state of decay, while confidence in the early demise of whiggism was no longer assured.

It is to Michael Bentley's credit that he has given sharper focus to both movements by charting their close interaction. His searching account has brought out of the shadows a struggle for supremacy between two competing models of historical writing, the one driven by close cultural attachments and political commitments, the other by a narrower ethic of ‘research’ through which history would become a science. Much of the dispute went beyond whiggism as an approach to English history, emphasizing the wide diffusion of its scholarly and political presumptions. Here, for example, is Gilbert Murray writing in 1944, a Classicist turned internationalist whose model of progress in world affairs in the twentieth century was whig through and through, as was his role as proselytizer for something he termed ‘liberality’. The occasion was the retirement of his protégé, Alfred Zimmern, as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford and his replacement by E. L. Woodward, one of Bentley's ‘modernist’ historians par excellence. It was a sad realization, he reflected to Zimmern,

Modernizing England's past applies a series of illuminating railway metaphors to two episodes in British historiography that ostensibly ran along parallel tracks, as the above quotation illustrates, but which nonetheless frequently converged. Bentley considers the nineteenth-century occupants of whig carriages from the perspective of those who rebelled against their presentist model of history writing, narrow focus on the constitution, limited use of primary sources, literary licence, unspecialized audiences, high Teutonism, problematic invocations of an homogeneous national spirit, equally problematic assumptions about the connection between a Protestant established church and liberty, and eagerness to attribute a representative character – and providential meaning – to the earliest institutions of government. He draws out in full the certainties and inspirations that moved whiggism as an historical frame of mind, and ultimately its subversion by historians with equally impassioned agendas, not least against the ideological ferment of the middle decades of the twentieth century and which they somehow imagined history as being above. He shows how, in the process, history diversified away from constitutional history towards social, economic, ecclesiastical, and imperial history, and away, also, from discrete nation-states as the anvil of history (p. 112), in aspiration, at least.

However, the new resting-places of the historical community seem much less clear-cut than they did to previous generations of whig obituarists. Bentley draws extensively on private correspondence and meditation to emphasize the faltering steps that modernists took away from their whig ancestors, and which coloured their published work as well, albeit less vividly (pp. 191–2). While the value of such sources is often questioned, the published text itself being regarded as uniquely significant, this book conveys the limits to understanding historiographical change in their absence; they sharpen, position, justify, and condemn in ways that would certainly have been out of place in the modernist preface. Nor does Bentley abuse such sources, for example, through heavy use of italics.

Modernism's sticking-point often proved to be nostalgia for a model of history writing that brought the past to life – something the modernists were rarely able to do, despite continuing belief in a ‘living’ past. The nostalgia focused particularly on a narrative uncomplicated by specialized research with its panoply of footnotes and statistics, and which kept personalities rather than anonymous structures in full view (pp. 115–16). Could it be, also, that nations and the patriotic attachments by which they are vitalized have never been entirely eclipsed by the impersonal historical processes that modernists sought to project through an avalanche of documentary and statistical evidence, in spite of their better whig selves?

Bentley excels in pointing to the problematic assumptions on which modernism, no less than whiggism, rested, its confusion of ‘facts’ with ‘events’, and ‘sources’ with ‘evidence’, the cure for which – he notes shrewdly – could have been found in ‘five minutes with Collingwood’ (p. 199). He also draws attention to the favourable circumstances of those who signed up to modernism, not so much in terms of background, which was often quite humble, nor male monopoly of the profession; indeed, women enjoyed distinguished careers as historians before the age of glass ceilings, as the examples of Eileen Power, Joan Thirsk, Dame Margery Perham, Lilian Knowles, and Helen Cam make clear. He emphasizes instead the relative freedom from domestic and administrative cares that provided the necessary condition, at least, for fulfilling the high scholarly ambitions for history of a Tout or Pollard, Elton or Powicke, Trevor-Roper or Woodward, Galbraith or Stenton (p. 222). He concludes with a plea that the modernists should not be dismissed entirely; like the whigs, they should be recognized as the ‘ghosts’ integral to ‘intimations’ of historical scholarship in the future. Nor is their legacy wholly discreditable; narrow their methodology may have been, but shallow their tomes were not, unlike so much of what passes for history with its recent revival – especially in televisual form – aimed at large popular audiences. The interest that one ‘modernist’ historian – Herbert Butterfield – has aroused in recent years suggests that the modernist past has not been forgotten. Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1923, Master of Peterhouse, 1955, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1944, Regius Professor in 1963, and University Vice-Chancellor in 1959, Butterfield left twenty-two books plus a large personal archive of unpublished writing and correspondence. His legacy is particularly rich in the realm of historical thought, as C. T. McIntire makes clear in a meticulous intellectual biography of Butterfield that is a model of its kind. This greatly overshadowed his work as a political and diplomatic historian (p. 405) and took him well beyond the boundaries of English history that continued to exercise the bulk of his modernist counterparts.

Bentley's book is a much-expanded version of the Wiles Lectures at Belfast delivered in 2003 that took as their theme ‘English historiography in the age of Butterfield and Namier’. His illuminating account of the fracas between these two seminal mid-twentieth-century historians concerning English politics in the age of George III and the wider models of historical study they epitomized recognizes Butterfield's janus-faced character. On the one hand, he was a whig revivalist against Namier's modernist strictures upon the scope and method of historical explanation; although, as McIntire emphasizes, he wished to reconstruct the ‘new’ Whig tradition of Fox, thus making Whiggism more inclusive (p. 59). This was the essence of his formative role in slaying whig historiography, ‘old’ style, expressed in his 1931 essay, The whig interpretation of history. On the other hand, with his enduring commitment to ‘technical history’ as the gold standard of historical research, he was ultimately the ‘prisoner’ of the modernist method (Bentley, p. 215). While he turned aggressively upon Namier and his ‘squadrons’ for excluding ideas and personalities from accounts of the ‘structure’ of eighteenth-century political life, and for his ‘static’ approach to the study of history, his simultaneous commitment to a more austere mode of historiography underlined the tensions in his work that he never succeeded in resolving.

The roots of both commitments stand out clearly in Butterfield's early life in Yorkshire, where he was born in 1900. Its contours have been painstakingly reconstructed by McIntire in a study that excels in close analysis of Butterfield's entire output, published and unpublished. McIntyre brilliantly evokes the Wesleyan Methodist ambience in which Butterfield grew up in the ‘company’ village of Oxenhope in the heart of industrial Yorkshire. His account of the formative influences on Butterfield at the level of both culture and relationships explains much about the historian's wide-ranging historical interests. These nevertheless crystallized in an uncompromising belief in the primacy of individual personality, in historiography no less than history, and which was imbued with his Methodist beliefs (p. 129). Torn between his ambition to become a writer and a Methodist preacher, Butterfield combined both roles in the vocation of historian, which he pursued in wide, missionary terms. This initially opened out to him as the only means of avoiding Mathematics in the upper form of Keighley Trade and Grammar School which he attended as a scholarship pupil, its title reflecting its ambiguous status. Although suffering several class knocks in the early stages of his steep ascent from a workman's cottage to the highest echelons of British intellectual life, Butterfield assimilated with surprising ease, not least through the help of his tutor at Peterhouse, the historian Paul Vellacott. It was Vellacott who took the edge off the fierce Harold Temperley, to whom Butterfield was indentured in what he always regarded as the elite historical trade of diplomatic history.

In this respect Butterfield well repays comparison with a Peterhouse colleague, the historian and classicist (Sir) Ernest Barker, who became the first Professor of Political Science at Cambridge in 1928. Barker shared fully Butterfield's northern origins among the Nonconformist working class, although he was more fortunate in attending Manchester rather than Keighley Grammar School, again through the scholarship route, and his Congregationalism pushed him towards the New Liberal movement which the Methodists were less well equipped to embrace.Footnote ⁴ Like Butterfield he attests to the power of the ancient universities in overcoming sharp class divides, outwardly at least, for the sense of being a mere ‘visitor’ never really left either men (McIntire, p. 413). If Barker demurred at the suggestion that he should apply for the headship of an Oxford College – New College – when it fell vacant in 1924 on the grounds of being ‘a son of a working man’, he harboured no bitterness, and in any case felt disadvantaged by a somewhat looser connection with the College than Butterfield enjoyed with Peterhouse.Footnote ⁵ Not surprisingly, both men drew on vast reservoirs of national pride, not least in the Second World War. This Bentley captures in a fine expression of Barkerian patriotism drawn from private correspondence between Barker and Michael Oakeshott in December 1940 (pp. 184–5). Both Barker and Butterfield succumbed to powerful whig assumptions about national homogeneity, respecting class as an integrating rather than divisive force within English society, and the cornerstone of English liberty. As McIntire perceptively observes in relation to Butterfield's high patriotic work written in the midst of the Second World War, The Englishman and his history (1944), the inspiration for ‘the Englishman’ at the heart of the study was his father, a mill hand turned mill office worker and beneficiary of the mill owner's favour until dispensed with when the mill owner no longer required his services (pp. 126–7). That Butterfield should have lauded so despotic a class system says much about his sense of gratitude to the Oxenhope elite for encouraging the ethic of improvement in his father that made possible his own advancement; it also underlines the Methodist impulse to forge communities across class and ultimately religious lines at the level of the nation as a whole, beating Anglicanism at its own game of ‘mediating’ between conflicting parties but without the compromises entailed by its links with the state. McIntire well emphasizes Butterfield's concern to develop an ‘insurgent’ form of Christianity for the twentieth century, one which was modelled on Methodism and distrust of the ‘Constantinian’ state (pp. 299–300, 315).

If this seems a far cry from the strictures of technical history that marked Butterfield out as a modernist historian par excellence, a holistic examination of his thought reveals its underlying coherence, as well as the multiple tensions between its different levels, invariably situated in the same, religious source. Not least – as McIntire points out – his emphasis upon the actions of individuals as the focus of history is undermined by his exclusion of historians from the interior realm that constitutes ‘personality’ and gives meaning to those actions (pp. 184–5).

Both the coherence and the tensions have also been illuminated by Keith Sewell in a rigorous study of Butterfield's historiography. As the title of his book suggests, Sewell sees Butterfield's thought as saturated with ‘interpretation’, and contradictory understandings of historical interpretation, too (p. 24). This was clear in his first two books, The historical novel (1924) and The peace tactics of Napoleon (1929). It was despite his attempts from the earliest stages of his career to separate historical scholarship from scientific theorization, emphasizing the ‘immediacy’ of the past for both the historian and historical novelist (p. 20) and their superiority to the scientist in constructing a narrative based upon actual events. This concern to preserve history pure and undefiled went hand in hand with recognition of its limitations in understanding the totality of human history, either as a cross-section of time only, or as the long-term processes that propelled it. But the recognition itself derived from a belief in the subsumption of history in a wider providential order that was present in his thought from the outset of his career. As Sewell explains, for Butterfield the order could not be known except through second-order ‘explanatory laws’ which took the actions and accomplishments of individual actors to a higher level of understanding. This linked them with processes and structures ‘going on over their heads’ (p. 23), but without negating the spontaneity and liberty of the individual, as befitted the image of God in man. Sewell argues that not only was this three-tiered analysis of the components of history – clarified after 1951 (p. 149) – shot through with a specifically Christian belief in divine providence as the motor-force of human history; even technical history could not exist apart from questionable decisions about the nature and interpretation of the evidence used, the selection of subjects for study, and so on (p. 216). He maintains that Butterfield would have done better to acknowledge at the outset the ineluctably interpretative nature of history at all levels. The superiority of his own interpretive scheme might have been secured by emphasizing its dependence upon a transcendental realm that freed it from subjection to ideologies and institutions that were part of history itself (p. 216).

A large part of Butterfield's motivation, as Sewell persuasively emphasizes, was the need to escape the fetters which partial, sectarian creeds imposed upon the minds of historians no less than political activists. ‘Technical history may be seen as Butterfield's attempt to preserve a nineteenth-century ideal’ (p. 125). Particularly in the German form developed by Ranke, technical history became a means of retaining standards of truth and objectivity in the human sciences, increasingly prey to the simplifications of Marxism, nationalism, and other creeds (pp. 125, 210). In his The whig interpretation of history of 1931, he had targeted whig history as the quintessence of the evils of presentism and anachronism, distorting the historical record in order to vindicate the goals of a particular party in the present. All Butterfield's recent interpreters emphasize the somewhat bizarre focus of the book in Lord Acton's insistence on the role of the historian as hanging judge, licensed to condemn from a perspective in the present that would have been alien to those in the historical dock. He certainly shared Acton's sensitivity to widespread sin in history; indeed, it was a leading article of his Methodist faith, although one that had to be balanced by ‘love’. But in his view, sin rather than sinners was the focus of historical inquiry, as if the identification of sin was any less imbued with presentist perspectives than sinners and detachable from the latter as well (McIntire, pp. 70–1).

Recent Butterfield scholars make clear his ambiguous status in relation to whig history – broadly as well as narrowly conceived – in other ways. Sewell writes tellingly of Butterfield's confidence in the 1920s that the study of history was moving in the right direction, only to become anxious after 1945 that technical history was becoming increasingly difficult to defend (pp. 125, 147). His immediate response was not to abandon technical history but to press its merits still harder, at the same time laying bare the Christian presuppositions on which it rested. As he wrote in 1949 in Christianity and history, a work that was based on lectures that reached a wide audience in Cambridge and nationally through the BBC, the obligation of the Christian was to ‘hold fast to Christ’ in the midst of a bewildering and inevitably fleeting array of rival systems of thought (1 Corinthians, 15, 1–10). Technical history became central to this steadfastness, ensuring that it was every bit as ‘committed’ as whig history itself, not least to the notion of a providential past.

But it was not just the fanatic that Butterfield feared; he was equally perturbed by the rise of the autodidact historian. In his view this had resulted from a spate of misguided efforts since the turn of the century to initiate the uneducated into all realms of learning, a process which had particularly blighted the humanities. As a prolific reviewer of history books, Butterfield surveyed the field of popular history as well as academic history, and frequently judged it wanting as a guide to history, historical research, and historical explanation.Footnote ⁶ He made an example of ‘The Teach Yourself History Library’ edited by A. L. Rowse for Hodder & Stoughton in 1948, an historian with whose egoism he was singularly out of sympathy; although in this he was not alone, not least among historians who, like him, shared Rowse's working-class roots.Footnote ⁷ With respect to Rowse's own contribution to the series, The use of history, he remarked upon the condescending style in which it was written, a product of the book's primary concern to address the lack of ‘culture’ in its humble readers rather than to emphasize history writing as a ‘technique’. While he approved of the biographical approach to history that had informed the series, conforming, as it did, with the emphasis on individual action as the mainspring of historical events that was his own historiographical leitmotif, he lamented the failure of the volumes to convey any sense of the problematic nature of history – above all its ‘elasticity’ – and to encourage readers to question the author's account. He singled out Christopher Hill's book on Lenin as especially liable to ‘imprison’ the reader, so carefully had it been written with a particular objective in view. Other volumes in the series struck him as decidedly ‘conventional’ in their approach to abridgement, failing to use the opportunity the series afforded of cutting new ‘cross-sections’ in history rather than simply truncating established ones. He also lamented the poor showing of diplomatic history in the series. While attempting to be positive, he ended the review with a clear warning that historians had signally failed to address the problem of how their specialist knowledge was being, and should be, transmitted to the lay man. At stake was the impact of history upon public opinion, government, and the shaping of policy. He was not convinced that historical knowledge had been adequately grasped and acted upon by policy makers in the nineteenth century, still less by the people upon whom government was centred in his own time. He urged the need for a revival of diplomatic history of ‘high and complicated texture’ and ‘modes of exposition which will communicate a sense of its complexity to a world seriously endangered by terrible simplicities and over-simplifications’.Footnote ⁸

Here, if ever, was the authentic voice of the ‘modernist’ historian. Butterfield was conscious of the need, on the one hand, to protect the ramparts of a discipline as necessarily esoteric but, on the other, to disseminate appropriately the findings of historical research if history was to drive politics and not the reverse. It is ironic then that his conception of the contingency and open-endedness of history was greatly inspired by an essay of 1922 by a man of letters, dilettante historian, and Roman Catholic convert, G. K. Chesterton. This is revealed by McIntire (p. 29), and it says much about the way in which the seal around modernist historians was far from hermetic: the place in which Chesterton had reflected on history in this way was his weekly column in The Illustrated London News.Footnote ⁹ It is even more ironic given that Chesterton's popular A short history of England of 1917 had been savaged by A. F. Pollard for its ‘indifferen[ce] to historical truth and unfamiliar[ity] with the ways of finding it’.Footnote ¹⁰ Truly the lines between the modernist and whig were blurred, as Bentley well suggests. They become even more oblique when, as McIntire's study shows conclusively, Butterfield adopted the role of ‘historian-preacher’ (p. 233), bringing his message before large and diverse audiences that would never have contemplated the kind of issues he raised about the relationship between religion and history otherwise. He was painfully aware of the risks he was running to his academic reputation in courting such publics, still more in discussing religion in the context of historical study (p. 177). Sewell suggests a key reason why Butterfield upheld ‘technical history’ for so long – while evidently realizing its limitations and indeed impossibility – was the ‘signal’ it gave to colleagues ‘that he was not going off the professional rails and drifting into realms of metaphysical speculation’ (p. 120).

Essentially, Butterfield – like Chesterton – was in search of a universal perspective that would absorb the exclusive faiths and ideals that seemed to offer by themselves such limited insight into ‘history and human relations’, to use the title of one of Butterfield's many books based upon popular lectures from the 1950s onwards. He was not only interested in unifying religion and history; as McIntire points out, he developed the role of the historian as ‘reconciler’, the practitioner of ‘charity’ who would cut through the density of human motives by extending ‘imaginative sympathy’ to all historical agents; troublingly, this included Hitler, emphasizing the pro-German sympathies Butterfield formed before 1914 and which two world wars never succeeded in eroding. The aim behind this ‘stereoscopic’ perspective was to preserve an amoral form of ‘technical history’ while at the same time actively promoting Christian values and beliefs. Contradiction was inevitable, not least in appearing to dissolve iniquity in the ‘circumstances’ that produced it, thereby negating the notion of individual personality and responsibility to which Butterfield ‘held fast’. Equally problematic was the assumption that the ‘circumstances’ that were relevant could be agreed upon by all historians, regardless of their ideological and religious leanings (McIntire, p. 218). This would be unlikely as even his conception of core Christian beliefs was disputed, and among fellow historians from a Nonconformist – if Congregationalist – background at that. For example, Maurice Powicke, recently retired as Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford, resisted Butterfield's pessimistic view of human nature, suggesting that humility and charity were in Butterfield's hands ‘the product of personal strain rather than of a happier confidence in a wider companionship’. They reflected his inability to escape from the pressures of the mid-twentieth century, thus ‘isolating himself too sharply from the wisdom of the ages’ in the process.Footnote ¹¹

Butterfield was undeterred. Indeed, the universalism in thought to which he aspired through history and historiography, mediated by Methodist precepts that were coloured by the vicissitudes of twentieth-century politics, found new applications in the field of international politics. McIntire discusses extensively his involvement in the British Committee on the Theory of International Relations (BCTIP) established by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1958. He emphasizes that while Butterfield imagined himself to be engaged in the theory of international relations – not the theory of history, to which he maintained a long-standing opposition – he made the new subject ‘a species of general historical thinking about human affairs’ (p. 306). At the same time, however, Butterfield failed to integrate theory and history, most of his papers to the Committee being exercises in historical inquiry (p. 349).

A significant addition to the current Butterfield revival is The international thought of Herbert Butterfield, an edition of his essays on international relations since the 1950s, both published and unpublished. The book has four sections, reflecting the breadth of Butterfield's interest in this area: ‘Diplomatic history’, ‘Faith and ethics in international politics’, ‘International theory’ (a selection of his papers to the BCTIP), and ‘Diplomacy’. As well as a general introduction and conclusion, the editors – Karl W. Schweizer and Paul Sharp – provide perceptive introductions to each of the sections. They are sympathetic to Butterfield's ideals of international polity, against which they measure international relations in the world today. They particularly defend the importance he attached to small, independent communities as integral parts of an international order maintained by the mechanism of a balance of power that precludes one nation from attaining a position of dominance (p. 280; see also Butterfield, pp. 225, 252, 169). By contrast, they point out that while national independence is still prized, there is little regard for cultural difference at an international level, still less for the systemic order of states which guaranteed the liberty and diversity of peoples. The priority given to problem-solving at an international level has pushed aside the need to counter the predominance of one power and accommodate rather than eliminate those powers deemed difficult, if not impossible to placate (p. 280). At the heart of the problem, the editors argue, is the loss of the power and efficacy of diplomacy at the heart of international life, by which Butterfield set so much store. He himself was much troubled by the blame that diplomats were made to carry for the debacle of 1914, and the balance of power doctrine with it, removing two major constructs of internationalism with long histories. The folly of public opinion in the interwar years in imagining that an international order had been ‘installed’ for the first time, and by agencies that were morally superior to the ‘bargaining’ of the ‘old diplomacy’ stood at the root of Butterfield's anxiety about modern democracy (p. 227).

Butterfield's trademark themes resound throughout these essays: the assertion of human weakness, the sanctity of individual personality, and the injunction against judging others, particularly when – as is so frequently the case in the political realm – judgements of others are intimately bound up with selfish interests (p. 138). There is, too, a clear emphasis upon the importance of history as the only framework of wise policy, providing maxims that will help to ease tensions and point the way out of what seems, on the surface, the ‘absolute impasse’ (p. 228). In this connection Butterfield applied one of his earliest notions – the need to co-operate with time and the cumulative results of the historical process – to international affairs (p. 149); as Sewell demonstrates, this was something that he had worked out in simultaneous contemplation of Machiavelli's political thought, on the one hand, and English historical development – whig style – on the other (ch. 4). It was imperative to work with rather than against history, Butterfield maintained, in order to forestall the doomsday scenario of ‘carry[ing] war to such a point that when hostilities are over it is impossible to recover the international order – the sense of all being members of the same club’ (p. 149).

The emphasis upon continuity in time is here matched by a conception of the systemic nature of the international order, developed above all by the skill of diplomats in bringing their rulers to see that raison d'état could not be the highest imperative, if only for prudential reasons (p. 144). The one exception to this paean for diplomats is Sir Edward Grey. In a paper delivered in Germany in 1964, Butterfield castigated Grey for deserting his role as ‘bridge-builder’ between two power blocs in July 1914, reverting instead to the tendency of his earlier policy of ‘sliding Russian aggressions into a pocket’; he acted under pressure from France and Russia which had no real basis and out of misguided considerations for the British Empire in Asia (pp. 104–6; McIntire, p. 6). Grey aside, diplomats are the unsung heroes of many of these essays, the figures who most labour – and creatively at that – to counteract the ‘cupidity of the wicked and the unwisdom of the righteous’ to which the realm of international affairs was especially vulnerable (p. 166). Their clear sense of perspective is matched only by early international theorists such as Hugo Grotius, whom Butterfield vindicated against Hedley Bull in a closely argued paper developed to the BCTIP in 1962. Rather than peddling illusory and dangerous ideals of international society, to which not just states but individuals were obligated, Butterfield emphasized that Grotius's notion of an international ‘system’ rooted in Christendom was all to the good of harmonious relations between states; equally, Grotius's ‘individualism’ played a key role in undermining the étatisme which enables sovereigns to spread their own personal guilt around their subjects (pp. 204–5).

Not surprisingly, Butterfield was a staunch opponent of nuclear brinkmanship in the 1960s and 70s; it represented a travesty of the diplomatic tradition that was not in any way redeemed by the slightest arrière-pensée of not keeping to the terms of the nuclear bluff. In the event of failure, nuclear deterrence would force Christianity – and the West with which it was so closely associated – ‘through the darkest of tunnels’. Equally serious was the ‘institutionalised and organised’ self-righteousness (p. 257) at its heart. Butterfield used the concept of self-righteousness freely to vilify all actions in international affairs based upon moral indignation at a perceived injustice. In this respect, it would appear that protest against Soviet intervention in Poland after 1945, Hungary in 1956, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 was somehow on a par with the nuclear ‘hoax’. The limits of Butterfield's international thought are perhaps most evident here. This was despite some ambiguity in his argument. For he well recognized that the tendency of conquered countries to ‘run to routine’ for several decades after their subjugation – thereby arguably vindicating their oppressors – could reflect mere acquiescence in, as much as conscious acceptance of, the new situation. Moreover, in the Eastern European examples above, he implies that the freedom enjoyed by some small states might require the sacrifice of that of others. This was in the interests of maintaining a balance of power between the two ‘massive watch dogs’ which in his view offered the best chance for ‘the continuance of such liberty as exist[ed]’ in the post-war world (p. 253).

The editors venture to suggest that the qualities Butterfield associated with successful diplomacy – tolerance, urbanity, flexibility, and self-restraint – were integral to his model of good conduct generally (p. 5). This makes sense of his defence of diplomatic history before the Cambridge University History Club in 1963, not just for the precision and rigour required for its successful practice but for the wider quality of discernment in identifying the calculations made by statesmen on the verge of momentous decisions (p. 21). Butterfield took the opportunity of the address to retreat from the call he had made some twenty years earlier for the expansion of historical study away from governments, taking account of more popular forces for change that had been left out of the count in much nineteenth-century history. However, he now believed that ‘the person who captures the reins of government does acquire extraordinary leverage in the historical process’ (p. 20); and the study and teaching of history should be adapted accordingly.

As McIntire points out, this was an example of Butterfield's penchant for ‘dissent’, even to the extent of abandoning his own dissenting positions when they started to catch on. But it can also be seen as the return of ‘premodernist’ themes to the modernist history agenda, just as Butterfield's missionary activity on behalf of history helped to revive the public role of the nineteenth-century historian that the modernists – in their tomes at least, A. J. P. Taylor aside – tended to repudiate.Footnote ¹²

Was the role really comparable, so imbued was it with theological purpose? Whatever answer is given to this question, Butterfield alerts us to the complex and shifting nature of ‘popular history’, the different political, pedagogical, patriotic, and religious ends it has served, even within the relatively short compass of the twentieth century. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for Butterfield to contain his interests within an academic specialism, so general were the issues he raised about humanity. On the other hand, unlike other popularizers of history outside of academe – Arthur Bryant for example – he did not write out of any sense of identity with ‘humble’ people, let alone their moral superiority over their flawed leaders, in recent times, at least; on the contrary, he was moved by a concern to maximize distance between elites and populace, certainly for the purposes of government. Butterfield emphasized the nature of statesmanship and diplomacy as a learned skill in much the same manner as Michael Oakeshott – editor of the Cambridge Journal, to the inaugural issue of which Butterfield contributed an important article in 1947 (McIntire, p. 173). The cross-currents between the political thought of Butterfield and Oakeshott reached much further, embracing an ardent belief in human imperfection, individual personality – or ‘individuality’ in Oakeshott's terms – and tradition; indeed, they bear much fuller comparison than is offered in the books under review (although McIntire cites Oakeshott among Butterfield's supporters in his dispute with Namier – p. 458 n. 44.) Such convictions coloured all of Butterfield's scholarly pursuits, turning him away from the ideal of the research historian that so motivated his ‘modernist’ contemporaries and towards historiography and its history as the main vehicle of his beliefs. There were many casualties among his projected works, most notably his biography of Fox, put on hold for four decades and never completed.Footnote ¹³ As these recent studies of Butterfield show so well, his strictures on historical method have proved inconsistent and incoherent. But if he illustrates the impossibility of objective historical inquiry, then the loss to historiography is the gain of political thought. For what Butterfield represents is a fine expression of English conservatism, grounded in a view of the historical process as something infinitely larger than the individual actions from which it is formed. As a whig in modernist drag, he turned the notion of providence outwards beyond the confines of English history to explain the workings of human society as a whole.