As a young Peterhouse, Cambridge, tutor, Herbert Butterfield termed his tactic in undergraduate supervisions “picking up the other end of the stick.” By this he meant invariably arguing “the diametrical opposite” to what a student had said (97). Associated with this approach was a desire to complicate history (102), which he displayed most famously in his Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), attacking simplistic, presentist, and progressive narratives. In his exceptionally illuminating new biography of Butterfield, there are numerous instances in which Michael Bentley has picked up the other end of that Butterfieldian stick to challenge previous understanding. That he is able to do so owes much to his use of previously inaccessible sources, not only Butterfield’s private journal but also his 1930s letters to a paramour, which allows Bentley to clarify a period for which others have been forced to rely on Butterfield’s own, often self-serving, recollections.

Butterfield was the son of a West Riding mill worker and Methodist preacher, and he relied on a series of scholarships and providential interventions (in his view) not only to avoid the mill but to become eventually master of Peterhouse and vice chancellor and regius professor of modern history at Cambridge. Bentley argues that Butterfield’s relationship to Yorkshire, and especially Methodism (he was for a time a preacher like his father), was more complicated than previously recognized. Indeed, in contrast to other scholars who have found in his Nonconformist roots the key to Butterfield’s thought, Bentley presents a man who in many ways parted from the family faith in the 1930s. He subsequently worshipped in Anglican churches as well as Methodist chapels, but he no longer preached after 1936 and developed a very idiosyncratic understanding of Christianity, influenced by a variety of German theologians.

Behind Butterfield’s critical attitude toward Nonconformity lay a painful extramarital affair. Some might criticize Bentley for devoting a chapter to this very personal subject, particularly as this is above all an intellectual biography, but he ably justifies his decision, as the affair explains not only why Butterfield stopped preaching, a conundrum to past scholars, but also his more radical subsequent religious views. Bentley persuasively argues that Butterfield came to believe that Methodism’s vision of human sexuality was too puritanical. For Bentley, then, Butterfield was neither the “innocent Nonconformist pietist” (93) some have assumed him to be nor simply the hypocrite of Cambridge gossip.

As this chapter on the “sex question” illustrates, a central aim of Bentley’s is to liberate Butterfield from what he calls “common-room clichés” (308). These involved not just rumors about his personal life but also the idea that he was a failure who “had never written the books he set out to write” (1). Central to this accusation was the unfinished biography of Charles James Fox on which Butterfield was assumed to have been working for decades. Bentley, however, rightly points to Butterfield’s ten “substantial books” (2) to counter claims that he was unproductive. Indeed, the Butterfield who emerges here is not really focused on eighteenth-century English history during his most productive years after the war. Instead, he transformed himself into a pioneering historian of world history, science, and above all historiography. For Bentley, then, Butterfield was far more imaginative, accomplished, and indeed courageous than envious Cambridge rivals.

Bentley, however, is no mere apologist for Butterfield either in his personal or in his intellectual life. He reveals Butterfield’s flaws as a husband, father, and friend, and he highlights his considerable limitations as master of Peterhouse. He supplants a vision of Butterfield as pious Nonconformist with one of an occasionally cynical, often devious, and always ambitious operator. And Bentley does not shrink from identifying what he considers the naïveté of Butterfield’s philosophy of history. In so doing, he is not judging Butterfield against the postmodern views of our present to find him wanting; rather, as Bentley points out, Butterfield had a more sophisticated understanding of history available to him via the contemporary work of his Cambridge colleague and erstwhile friend Michael Oakeshott.

How persuasive, in the end, is Bentley’s rehabilitation of Butterfield? He is certainly right that Butterfield had a career to be envied, not merely in terms of the positions he held but also in terms of productivity. Regarding powers of mind and originality of thought, however, there is room for doubt. While Butterfield was surely brave to leave the relative comfort of eighteenth-century English politics to investigate new fields, his efforts were either introductory, as with the history of science, or incomplete, as with the history of historiography, and always rushed. Often outside pressures, particularly academic administration, prevented him from giving his full attention to his various projects after 1950, which contributed to a lack of sophistication in his work. Here the apt comparison would not be to envious (for Bentley) Cambridge rivals like Jack Plumb, Kitson Clark, or Geoffrey Elton but rather to someone like Butterfield’s near contemporary Christopher Dawson, who trod some of the same ground with regard to world history, international relations, and Christianity and history but in advance of Butterfield and in a more sustained and erudite fashion (although without the academic laurels).

In the final analysis, then, perhaps Butterfield’s most significant legacy lay in the training of historians that he pioneered as a young tutor, in that admonition to “pick up the other end of the stick.” As Bentley points out, this became a Peterhouse tradition, and, one might add, it spread, helping to make British historiography so stimulating (although it sometimes has unduly rewarded mere cleverness and mischievous contrariness). Butterfield, as Bentley notes, may not have trained scores of accomplished historians ready to defend the great man’s legacy, as Plumb and Elton did, and his reputation has suffered from this lack of a Butterfield “school,” but his methods prevailed, and this is perhaps a greater bequest.