1. ‘One of his most violent essays’
The year 1949 was Herbert Butterfield’s annus mirabilis. In that year – indeed in a single month – he published no fewer than three books. George III, Lord North and the People, Christianity and History and The Origins of Modern Science 1300–1800 all appeared in October 1949. Only George III resembled anything like a conventional historical monograph.1 The other two were ground-breaking. Christianity and History, based on a series of lectures given in Cambridge in the autumn of 1948 and repeated over the BBC the following Easter, answered to the widely felt need for spiritual and historical explanation at a time of recovery from war and incipient cold war, and sold 30,000 copies. The Origins of Modern Science, based on lectures given in Cambridge earlier in 1948, almost single-handedly established the history of science as a new scholarly discipline. For Butterfield, aged forty-nine, Methodist lay preacher, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, since 1923 and Professor of Modern History at Cambridge since 1944, these two books marked his emergence as a figure of major intellectual importance both nationally and internationally. They also represented the culmination of four years of almost unremitting creativity and hard work. It was not surprising that, as Michael Bentley writes, ‘By the autumn of 1949 Butterfield was utterly wrecked with exhaustion.’2 Fortunately for his health and his state of mind, he was then to embark on what he was to look back on as ‘the best moment of his academic life’: a long-anticipated sabbatical term at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.3
Yet these books did not mark the limit of Butterfield’s activity in the years 1948–9. In the course of 1949 alone, he published his six BBC lectures in the Listener; further articles on Christianity and history and the history of science; and an article on Charles James Fox in the Cambridge Historical Journal.4 And in June 1949 an article appeared in the Irish journal Studies, which reflected a quite different preoccupation. ‘Official history: Its pitfalls and its criteria’ is better known in the version that was included, considerably revised and extended, in a collection of Butterfield’s essays, History and Human Relations, published in 1951; and it is this second version that has attracted attention over the years on the part of both Butterfield specialists and those interested in official history as scholars, practitioners or critics. Butterfield’s article represents perhaps the most critical judgement on official history written by any British historian since the Second World War. Michael Bentley describes it as ‘one of his most violent essays’,5 and it contains some of his most striking and most frequently quoted aphorisms.6 However, such shafts of brilliance are embedded in Butterfield’s typically contorted, elliptical and sometimes surprisingly apologetic prose; and it is difficult to discern in the article a sustained or coherent argument as opposed to a succession of assertions, some well founded, others of doubtful provenance. It is all very different from A.J.P. Taylor, the historian who most closely resembles Butterfield in his scepticism towards official history. Taylor delighted in expressing his views on the defective editing of British and German diplomatic documents of the inter-war period, pungently, repetitively and in the most public places: his favoured outlets were the Times Literary Supplement and the Manchester Guardian.7 Publishing in an Irish journal and a modest volume of essays, Butterfield was less forthright, less willing to cause offence or to lose friends; yet at his best he achieved insights that Taylor never matched.
Some readers of his article have welcomed Butterfield’s vigilance in keeping editors of diplomatic documents up to the mark, foremost among them the late Keith Wilson, perhaps the historian who comes closest to being Butterfield’s spiritual heir in this respect.8 Others have deplored his apparent implication that Britain should have made peace with Nazi Germany in order to let Germany and Russia fight each other to destruction.9 Richard Aldrich has even suggested that Butterfield was making ‘a comment on Ultra as the “missing dimension” of the official histories the war’.10 This last claim is wide of the mark. I believe that Butterfield’s preoccupations were more old-fashioned and had more to do with traditional despatches and telegrams than with signals intelligence and codebreaking (although, as it happens, Bletchley Park and its environs do play a part in the story).
For in accepting an invitation from ‘the Historical Society of University College, Dublin’,11 to give a paper on ‘contemporary history’ on 14 December 1948 – the paper that became the basis of his official history article12 – Butterfield was returning to a subject that had preoccupied him almost since the beginning of his academic career, studying diplomatic history under Harold Temperley in the 1920s – the relationship between government and history; more specifically, the efforts he believed that every government in every era made to bend history to its own purposes. It was a preoccupation expressed most succinctly in a letter to A.J.P. Taylor in August 1949, in which he wrote: ‘I am as a historian against all governments, or rather I believe that something oblique is going on behind all governments, giving them a seamy side.’13 Not long before his death thirty years later, in one of the last letters he wrote to his old friend Professor T. Desmond Williams of University College Dublin, Butterfield was still deprecating the efforts of universities ‘to please the government of the day’ and ‘the temptations to give official opportunities, even special facilities for the study of official documents to members of Institutes who will soon tend even to be competing with one another for official favour or special contacts with governments’.14
But if this says something about the importance Butterfield attached to official meddling with the historical record, it does not explain the timing of his paper or the nature of its contents; nor the speed with which he turned, in the early months of 1949, to preparing it for publication with a view to circulating it to as many as possible of his academic colleagues. Part of the answer may lie in his hostility to the kind of official history practised by the British government since 1941, when the decision had been taken to record Britain’s war effort, both military and – for the first time – civil, in two series of narrative histories edited respectively by Butterfield’s Cambridge colleague Professor J.R.M. (later Sir James) Butler and Professor W.K. (later Sir Keith) Hancock.15 The two series came to occupy the energies of some of the brightest talents of the British historical profession, including Cambridge colleagues close to Butterfield: Michael Postan (a Fellow of Peterhouse) and Betty Behrens (a Fellow of Newnham College), whose decision to join the Cabinet Office’s programme provoked Butterfield’s bitter opposition because of the harm it would do to her professional career (in which he was proved right); because she would be reneging on her teaching commitments in Cambridge; but also, crucially, because she would be writing ‘from sources over whose provision she would have no control’.16 Michael Bentley is probably right when he writes that ‘His violent postwar attack on the entire concept of official history has a personal edge one rarely finds in Butterfield’s published work and Betty surely provided the stimulus for it.’17
Yet none of the wartime civil histories had appeared by the time Butterfield published his Studies article (although the first, British War Economy, by Keith Hancock and Margaret Gowing, actually came out in June 1949); and the article paid no attention to narrative history at all (unless one counts a single reference to an unnamed publication by the Ministry of Information). It was the publication by governments of diplomatic documents that preoccupied Butterfield and made his Dublin talk and Studies article a matter of such urgency. And here two contexts are important: one general, the other much more specific.
Publishing the diplomatic record of the inter-war period
The general context is the revival of the practice of editing diplomatic documents at the end of the Second World War. The 1920s had seen a great proliferation of publishing projects purporting to illuminate the diplomatic background to the catastrophe of 1914 and, more immediately, to justify the conduct of the various governments involved. It began with the Bolshevik publication of documents from the tsarist era and reached its apogee with the monumental Die Grosse Politik der europäischen Kabinette 1871–1914, published in fifty-four volumes between 1922 and 1927, which quickly became notorious for its tendentious presentation of German policy. The British response, British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914, was edited by Butterfield’s two most important academic mentors: his doctoral supervisor, the domineering and irascible Harold Temperley, and the kindly G.P. Gooch who, as external examiner, had been instrumental in the decision to award Butterfield a first-class degree. The series appeared in eleven volumes between 1924 and 1938, coinciding, therefore, with the first decade and a half of Butterfield’s career as a Cambridge don.
At the end of a second conflict two new documentary series were launched. Both derived largely from the initiative of E.L. Woodward, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who had been seconded to the Foreign Office since 1939 but had been closely associated with the Office on previous tasks.18 Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939 (DBFP), announced by the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, in March 1944, was the outcome of a prolonged campaign by Woodward to counter the influence first of German and later of American documentary publications, and to ensure that, as Eden put it, the British case should not ‘go by default’.19 Edited by Woodward and his All Souls colleague Rohan Butler, volumes in the first two series, covering the period 1919–38, started to appear in 1946–8, while a new third series, covering the period between the Anschluss and the outbreak of war, was initiated in 1949. Controversy accompanied the project in its early years, beginning with A.J.P. Taylor’s notorious (and nominally anonymous) review of the first volume of the second series in the TLS of 12 April 1947 which drew a derogatory comparison between the editorial independence of Woodward and Butler and that of Gooch and Temperley.20 Taylor also criticized their decision to print only official despatches and telegrams, with no letters and no internal Foreign Office minutes – points, incidentally, that were not original but had been suggested to him by the editor of the TLS, Stanley Morison. In the furore that followed, Morison lost his job and Taylor was obliged to withdraw the accusation of lack of independence; but Woodward (‘a skilled intriguer’, according to Taylor) never forgave him.21 The affair touched on Butterfield’s deepest academic and filial loyalties as well as reinforcing his suspicion that ‘our “official historians” were becoming accomplices in an effort to lull us to sleep’.22 For Butterfield, perpetual vigilance was imperative.
The discovery of a huge cache of documents from the German Foreign Office by Allied troops in March–April 1945 led to a second Woodward initiative when, in November 1945, Butterfield proposed the publication of an authoritative record of German foreign policy based on these and other relevant German archives.23 The proposal derived from Woodward’s fear, shared with Namier, that the Germans might seek to influence interpretations of the origins of this second war, just as they had done with the Grosse Politik in the 1920s.24 At first conceived as a four-power project, it became an Anglo-American one when the Soviets refused to participate, with an agreement signed on 19 June 1946; the French government subsequently joined the project in April 1947. The German Foreign Office archives were held first at Marburg and later in Berlin; but in the autumn of 1948, during the Soviet blockade of the western zones of the city, they were evacuated, along with the multinational editorial team, to Whaddon Hall in Buckinghamshire, part of the wartime Bletchley Park complex.25 Each country appointed an editor-in-chief, a position held first for the United Kingdom by John Wheeler-Bennett, then jointly by James Joll and General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall from June to December 1948, then by Sir James alone until 1951.26
The first volumes in the series Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945 (DGFP) started to appear in English from 1949 and in German from 1950 onwards. If the test for the British series was whether it met the high standards set by Gooch and Temperley, the German series evoked a different kind of disquiet on Butterfield’s part. He had deep respect for German historical scholarship and had many friends among the German academic community, some encountered during a controversial lecture tour of German universities in 1938.27 If German scholars could not be trusted to publish their diplomatic documents with sufficient detachment, would American, British or French scholars – scholars who were, in Butterfield’s words, engaged in ‘the most subtle of all historical tasks, the selection of such of the diplomatic documents of the defeated power as we shall allow to be published to the world’28 – do a better job? When he wrote those words Butterfield knew what he was talking about, for he had a direct line to the heart of the German document project.
Desmond Williams and the German documents
That direct line, and the second, more immediate context for Butterfield’s worries about official history, was provided by one man: Desmond Williams. Butterfield had succeeded Temperley as external examiner to the Irish universities in 1938 and the attractions of wartime visits to congenial colleagues in neutral Ireland more than made up for the arduous duties the job entailed.29 He had first encountered Williams as an outstandingly able student at University College Dublin (UCD). In 1944, impressed by his ‘amazing’ master’s thesis on the rise of National Socialism and by a precocious devotion to German scholarship as fervent as his own,30 Butterfield persuaded Williams to read for a PhD in Cambridge.31 Despite, or perhaps because of, Williams’s chaotic personal habits and unorthodox political views, a close friendship soon developed.32 Things went wrong, however, in 1947 when Butterfield tried to get Williams elected as a Bye-Fellow at Peterhouse. The Master of the College, Paul Vellacott, vetoed the appointment, probably because of a notorious incident in which a drunken Williams and an equally drunken undergraduate, Colin Welch, had played a practical joke on an unpopular bursar. Welch was sent down; Williams escaped unscathed, but paid the price with the end of his Peterhouse career.33
In September 1947, on the rebound from Peterhouse and on Butterfield’s recommendation (probably to James Passant, the Foreign Office librarian whom he knew well as a former medievalist at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge), Williams took a job with the British Foreign Office team editing the German documents in Berlin. He remained there until the autumn of 1948 when, along with the rest of the editorial team, he was evacuated to Whaddon Hall. Here he was only a short train journey from Cambridge and he visited Butterfield often over the winter of 1948–9. He also spoke to him frequently on the telephone and wrote a number of letters. These letters, written first from Berlin and Dublin, and later from Whaddon Hall, represent only a small element of an intensely close personal and intellectual relationship, but provide important clues to what they were talking about.34 Williams’s first and only letter from Berlin was undated but probably written some time during the period of growing tension before the imposition of the Soviet blockade on 18 June 1948 because, he said, there was ‘serious doubt whether we can remain in Berlin much longer’.35 Much of this long letter was devoted to ruminations on the Peterhouse debacle of the previous year, but there was also much positive news about the editorial project, not least because it promised to overturn orthodox views on the origins of the war:
The work is quite fascinating from our viewpoint. We here in Berlin owing to the failure of Wheeler-B to keep in contact have been given complete responsibility in the final selection of Vol 1 & 2. This goes to some extent to satisfy my personal doubts on the ‘ethics’ of this present post, and I feel that when these volumes appear at the end of the year, they will not be open to the accusation of partisan selection. In brief the results tend to rehabilitate Neville C and Halifax and most of the permanent staff of the F.O. (always excluding Vansittart).36 A quandary which has caused great pain to our American colleagues is the fact that the documents of the ‘professional’ German diplomats display considerable integrity, very sound judgement, and immense courage in their reports and despatches back to the Wilhelmstrasse. Even such an organisation as the Auslandsorganisation of the Party (which possessed a separate department of the F.O. since 1937) is shown to be quite innocent of most of the charges levelled against it. Of 5th columnist stories, etc. there is almost a complete absence.
Williams also had time for his own research. His ‘hopes as to the possibility of utilising the pre-1914 documents’ had been fulfilled; the libraries were ‘wonderful’; and he had had several meetings with leading historians, including Friedrich Meinecke (‘a grand old failing giant’), Gerhard Ritter and Ulrich Noack.37 But he already had severe reservations about the German document project, and they centred on two figures whose names were to recur through his subsequent correspondence. One was the American editor-in-chief, Raymond J. Sontag; the other was E.L. Woodward. With Sontag the issue focused on the American decision to publish, without prior warning to their allies, a separate volume of documents, Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941. Appearing in January 1948 as a propaganda instrument in the intensifying Cold War, the volume provoked anger on the part of their British and French colleagues, and indeed of the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin.38 Williams gave a concise account of the affair:
I had hoped to return to England sooner – but the necessities occasioned by premature American publication of War Documents and the consequential ‘propaganda’ have kept me in Berlin … Sontag has certainly produced a remarkable volume which even in the eyes of the F.O. is a peculiarly disgraceful exhibition of ‘la trahison des clercs’. I do not know whether you have read the State Department book on Russo-German relations, but it contains no fewer than 501 translation errors!!! … As usual, Sontag produced his work without consulting his colleagues and Bevin’s somewhat sharp criticism is if anything too light. Wheeler B and Renouvin are, I must say, taking a sound historical line.39
It is not easy to see exactly what Woodward had done to annoy Williams, but the latter’s hostility is clear:
Sontag horrified his colleagues by complaining that the material relating to [?Austria] is all too favourable to Hitler, and that we had better drop it altogether. He also expressed a worry that Congress should blame him for financing a production which if anything might overthrow the historical version of 1939 which inspired many of its actions.40 According to Wheeler Bennett, Woodward – although not directly involved, has also in the matter of advice, taken a most peculiar line, and indeed I am not surprised after reading his Inaugural Lecture of 1945.41 However, as you once wisely remarked – these propagandists will let the cat out of the bag with their various feuds, and thereby leave for future historians the denied material. In one sense, it is much better that they should all quarrel, and seem to blacken each other.
Apart from a single letter from Dublin, written in May 1948 (‘I shall not forget to post you the reference on Woodward’),42 all of Williams’s six remaining letters were sent from Whaddon Hall. The timing of these letters is important. They fall into three phases: two in November and early December 1948, in other words the time when Butterfield was preparing his talk for University College Dublin; two in March 1949, after Butterfield’s article had been sent to press but before it had been published – these contained Williams’s most alarming allegations about the German document project – and a final pair in July 1949, when Williams was on the verge of leaving the German editorial team.
We can picture Butterfield trying to put together the paper he had promised UCD. As usual, he would have been overworked and overcommitted, turning his mind to official history after completing his gruelling series of lectures on Christianity and history to the Cambridge Divinity School, probably by the end of November; and having barely a fortnight before he sailed to Dublin on 8 December, to deliver his paper on the 14th. Williams wrote to him on 23 November:
I send you by parcel post today ‘Nazi–Soviet Relations – 1939–41’ published by the State Dept. The editors are working with us on the Documents but we take no responsibility for this ‘separate’ production.
I do not think it would be wise to be concrete in any remarks on the forthcoming volumes or on the Woodward plot over the Halifax letter until it is actually hatched. The defects of Sontag’s production can easily be gleaned from a hasty perusal. Note particularly the choice of time for the first documents, and the omission of the previous history of Soviet–British relations. The references in the German documents to them are also omitted. I send you the Russian comment (in German).
I hope in the next day or two (but it may be difficult) to send you the original Russian Document[s] themselves which they have published from the German papers.43
Again, what Williams thought about Nazi–Soviet Relations is clear; it is not so easy to discover what he meant about ‘the Woodward plot over the Halifax letter’.44 Expressing his thanks on 3 December, Butterfield was uncertain whether the two volumes were confidential (rather surprisingly in the American case, since Nazi–Soviet Relations was to become one of the State Department’s greatest publishing successes)45 and asked whether, if he commented on them, ‘would this be irregular, and should I be in danger of giving you away[?]’.46 On the eve of Butterfield’s departure for Ireland, Williams replied: ‘Thank you for the quick return of the books. I shall bring you in person the Russian volumes which have now been translated into English. They are not “confidential”.’47 He added that he would be travelling to Ireland on 11–12 December and returning on the 13th, ‘if I get my 24 hours leave’: in other words, he would not be present when Butterfield gave his paper at UCD.
Williams’s contributions duly found their way into Butterfield’s paper, along with a miscellany of other examples including wartime publications from the Ministry of Information, military despatches and, most importantly, the editorial practices of Gooch and Temperley. There were two extended references to Nazi–Soviet Relations. One questioned the independence of the editors – about which, he said, the book’s preface and editors’ foreword seemed to ‘protest too much’.48 The second reference, on the other hand, praised the editors for including the statement that ‘Each document has been printed in full, without omissions or alterations.’49 This, he felt, was firmer than ‘a mere guarantee that nothing “relevant” or “important” had been omitted’ (presumably a dig at the editors of DBFP).50 Butterfield’s other reference to the German document project followed one of several unfavourable comparisons between DBFP and its predecessors, focusing once again on the editors’ decision not to publish internal Foreign Office minutes: ‘We shall be alert to discover whether the same principles are adopted in the publication of the captured German documents.’51
Publishing ‘Pitfalls’
Early in 1949 Father P.J. Connolly SJ, the editor of Studies, wrote to Butterfield inviting him to publish his paper on ‘contemporary history’ in his journal.52 At first sight, a quarterly review published by the Irish Province of the Society of Jesus was not the best vehicle to reach a large audience in the United Kingdom, despite its important place in the intellectual life of the Republic. But it offered the possibility of early publication – as early as the March 1949 issue – and, when he wrote on 16 February to accept Connolly’s offer, Butterfield requested fifty offprints in order to ‘get into the hands of historians, many of whom will not be readers of Studies’.53 Butterfield moved quickly, sending his manuscript on 20 February; but not quickly enough to make the March issue.54 However, delay until June gave him an opportunity to make two late additions.55 One was actually included as a footnote to his manuscript in order, he said, ‘to do justice to a new volume [of DBFP] which seems to have followed the rules better’;56 the other, requested on 7 March when the article was already at proof stage, had to be appended as a lengthy ‘PS’.57 Both additions offer insights into the thoughts troubling Butterfield’s mind in the interval between the delivery of his paper in December 1948 and early March 1949.
The footnote (published on page 135 of the article) called a temporary truce with Woodward and Butler. As we have seen, Butterfield shared (albeit less stridently) Taylor’s doubts about their editorial independence and their decision not to publish Foreign Office minutes. In his footnote Butterfield took the opportunity to acknowledge a change in practice in subsequent volumes of DBFP which, his view, marked a welcome return to the policy of Gooch and Temperley regarding the inclusion of Foreign Office minutes and an explicit declaration of editorial independence.
The second addition, also intended as a footnote if it had not arrived too late, again seemed to hark back to the era of Gooch and Temperley, since it would have been added to the section (page 131 in the published version) where Butterfield discussed Temperley’s views on ‘the decline of frankness’ in British diplomacy between the time of Canning and Palmerston and that of Sir Edward Grey. Butterfield’s postscript indeed began with Temperley. But the perspective shifted quickly to a different subject. The German document project had now become the focus of his deepest suspicions of governmental interference. Butterfield demanded the utmost vigilance on the part of the editors in pursuit of any gaps they might suspect in the documentation, insisting that they should not say they had seen documents when they had only seen photostats, ‘possibly reduced in number after re-photographing in some allied government department’:58
It is essential that the editors, if they suspect the existence of further documents, should pursue them remorselessly and, if they fail to find them, should give an account of this, guarding the historical student rather than officialdom.
Butterfield concluded by resuming his altercation with the editors of DBFP, acknowledging their vigilance in pursuing missing telegrams but returning to the charge that the decision not to publish minutes and memoranda meant that ‘the enquiry is cut off (so far as the public is concerned) at the critical points’. And his final sentence hinted cryptically at mysteries still to be revealed:
We shall also learn from our own publications of the German documents how far the real secrets of foreign offices are to be found in the formal diplomatic correspondence and how far it is true that the really revealing documents are the ones which, in the case of the British Foreign Office, are being withheld.
Williams sounds the alarm
What prompted this late addition, with its intimation that documents were being deliberately held back from publication in both the German and the British series, and its insistence that the editors should see the original documents and not photostats? What, in other words, had Desmond Williams been saying? It would be tempting at this point to engage in the kind of historical ‘reconstruction’ that Butterfield compared (in a paragraph omitted from the revised version)59 to a detective story – a genre to which he was addicted. In this case, however, we cannot play Sherlock Holmes confounding Scotland Yard because what looks at first sight like the key piece of evidence, ‘so pivotal in character that it governs the interpretation of the other clues, and then produces a new map of the whole affair’, turned up a full two weeks after Butterfield had submitted his final revision to the editor. It arrived in the form of a letter from Williams dated 24 March 1949: the first he had written to Butterfield since early December. The letter is worth quoting in full:
My dear Herbert,
A hurried line. 1 and [sic] 2 of my colleagues are considering resigning if suspicions we have very recently entertained prove to be correct. This is at present in the realm of hypothesis – but we are pretty certain that the F.O. has contrary to solemn (if evasive) assurance has [sic] withheld 400 documents on Anglo-German relations which they have stated were missing from the original German collection when found.
I would like to discuss the whole matter thoroughly with you and in great confidence. There is no immediate rush but I could come to Cambridge the week-end following this coming one – in early April.
It is indeed an appalling story – if true – and indication of the incompetent villainy of official historians.
With good wishes as ever
Yours
Desmond
P.S. Please excuse this brevity – but it is a long story and the post calls.
The date of the letter means that it cannot be the source of the anxieties expressed in Butterfield’s additions to his article. It must nonetheless have reinforced suspicions already in his mind and probably fostered by further exchanges with Williams between Christmas 1948 and early March 1949 of which we have no written record: suspicions that undoubtedly prompted the postscript to his article.60 Indeed, this is confirmed by a conciliatory letter to Woodward, written after the Studies article had appeared, when Butterfield told him that ‘my question about the mechanics of selecting the documents happened to be concerned (in my thoughts)61 not so much with your series as with the German series, which presents a case where the Foreign Office might62 not trust all the people assisting it as much as it would trust you’.63
Williams’s letter of 24 March 1949 (backed up by a subsequent telephone conversation)64 must therefore have confirmed Butterfield’s suspicions about the German project in the most dramatic way. He took decisive action. On 1 April he wrote formally to Williams, copying his letter to the Master of Peterhouse (Vellacott), the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University (Charles Raven, a theologian and friend) and James Passant at the Foreign Office.65 ‘If what you describe has been substantiated,’ Butterfield wrote, ‘in my opinion it is your duty to resign in a signal manner, making the reason as public as possible, and doing this as soon after you have clarified the situation as you can reasonably manage.’ For his own part, Butterfield went on, ‘I can’t think that any possible consequences to myself would deter me from airing a matter so important to the public and to historical science, if the case is such as you describe.’
At very least, Butterfield’s injunction to resign on a matter of principle was disingenuous, since he had been plotting for the previous two years to secure Williams a position at University College Dublin: a position that ultimately became nothing less than the new Chair of Modern History. As early as September 1947, the month in which Williams failed to secure the Peterhouse Bye-Fellowship, Butterfield had been discussing with Father Aubrey Gwynn SJ, a lecturer in medieval history at UCD, the possibility that Desmond Williams might be persuaded to return to UCD. At that point, the failure of the college authorities to make a sufficiently attractive offer had led Williams to accept the Foreign Office post.66 However, the death of the Professor of History, John O’Sullivan,67 in February 1948 opened an opportunity, Father Gwynn wrote, to adopt ‘a new policy of separating the present Chair of History into two independent chairs of Medieval and Modern History’. ‘This’, he went on, ‘is the opportunity for which Des. Williams has, I presume, been waiting; and the probable time-table should suit him well – as new statutes will be required and the two chairs are not likely to be filled before the summer of 1949.’68 Despite reservations about entrusting ‘so big and important a chair to so young a man, without any previous experience of his quality as teacher, examiner or colleague’,69 in June 1948 UCD ‘finally decided to act on your advice, take a plunge boldly and appoint him at once to the new Professorship of Modern History’.70 In the autumn of 1949, at the age of twenty-eight and supported by Butterfield’s fulsome reference,71 Williams took up his appointment, a position he held until 1983. The new Chair of Medieval History was occupied by Father Aubrey Gwynn.
Williams was therefore under no pressure to resign from the editorial team, and there is no sign in Butterfield’s papers that he went further to substantiate the allegation that the Foreign Office was deliberately withholding 400, or any number, of documents on Anglo-German relations. Nor did Butterfield put his head above the parapet by ‘airing a matter so important to the public and to historical science’.72 He did, however, have another string to his bow, for his article on the pitfalls of official history in the June 1949 issue of Studies was still to appear. And there was definitely substance to Desmond Williams’s allegations.
The Windsor papers
In the years between 1945 and 1949, and again between 1953 and 1957, the British government attempted variously to destroy, conceal or prevent the publication of a cluster of documents that told the story of the German government’s attempts to influence the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during their journey in 1940 from the south of France through Spain and Portugal to Lisbon, from where the Duke was to sail in order to take up his post as Governor of the Bahamas.73 The story is familiar and has been extensively discussed, often in sensationalist terms.74 It represented the British government’s only known attempt to interfere with the editorial independence of the German documents project: but that very fact made the challenge a serious one.75
The documents in question had been discovered at an early stage in the inspection of 400 tonnes of documents from the German Foreign Office discovered at various locations in Thuringia and Lower Saxony in March– April 1945, and moved at the beginning of May to Marburg, north of Frankfurt and well beyond the reach of the advancing Soviet forces. The files were stored in the castle where they were microfilmed, the microfilms then being sent to the Foreign Office in London and the State Department in Washington.76
At the Foreign Office, Rohan Butler later recalled, it was Woodward’s job to go through the microfilms. ‘It happened, though, that Woodward was on leave in July 1945 so that it fell to me to be the first to report on the Windsor documents, as I well remember.’77 In a collection of documents on Anglo-German relations from the office of Ernst von Weizsäcker, the head of the German Foreign Office, there were several, Butler reported, in which the Duke of Windsor ‘appears in a somewhat curious light’.78 Numerous British attempts to get the relevant items either destroyed or delivered into exclusively British hands were rebuffed by the Americans during the summer and autumn of 1945; but the State Department eventually agreed to keep its microfilm of the Windsor papers under lock and key.79 This was not the end of the story, however. For in June 1946, as we have seen, the British and American governments accepted Woodward’s proposal to publish the German documents. It still required a direct appeal from Wheeler-Bennett to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin before they were released,80 but the Windsor papers eventually took their place among all the other German documents being considered for publication, first in Berlin (to which they were moved from Marburg in January 1946), and later at Whaddon Hall.
But did the Windsor papers form the basis of Desmond Williams’s allegation about the withholding of ‘400 documents on Anglo-German relations’? One man certainly thought so. Paul Sweet, the American diplomatic historian who joined the US editorial team in September 1948 and became its head in 1952, read Butterfield’s chapter in History and Human Relations with particular interest because he had worked closely with Desmond Williams at Whaddon Hall and knew of the friendship between the two men. He recalled in 1956 that ‘when his book came out it seemed to me that, to illustrate the dangers of official history, he might have found better examples than in the tripartite project’, adding that ‘in this essay Butterfield referred with approval to the procedures of the editors of the German documents, contrasting them, much to the latter’s disadvantage, with the practice of Sir Llewellyn Woodward, who, as editor of the British documents, omitted the marginal notes documenting the course of discussion within the Foreign Office’.81
When Paul Sweet arrived at Whaddon Hall in September 1948 he already knew about the Windsor documents and assumed that their publication had already been agreed.82 He was therefore surprised when, some months later, on 15 June 1949, the subject was raised by Malcolm Carroll, the outgoing head of the American team, in a meeting with James Passant, the Foreign Office librarian:
In the course of a few words of farewell, Carroll, addressing himself to Passant, said: ‘The list of documents for 1939–40 is complete, and the editors will soon be able to make the final selection. The documents concerning the Duke of Windsor would then have to be discussed, and he [Carroll] thought that the most important documents should be published.’ To this E.J. Passant replied that the documents were available and that, if selected, they would be published. It surprised me that Carroll raised the subject, since I had thought that the question of publication was no longer a matter of dispute. In any case, now, after Passant’s reply, the matter must surely be considered closed.83
The matter of the Windsor documents must indeed have been closed, presumably to the satisfaction of all present at Whaddon Hall. Evidently, however, some kind of discussion on whether they should be published had been carried on during the preceding months. And it was presumably this that had prompted the alarm raised by Desmond Williams in his letter to Butterfield of 24 March. True, there were nowhere near ‘400 documents’, but the eighteen eventually published still amounted to a substantial collection.84 Williams may have been referring obliquely to these documents – he was definitely referring to some kind of improper behaviour on the part of the Foreign Office – when he wrote to Butterfield on 15 July, on the eve of his departure from Whaddon Hall:
I am indeed most glad to be leaving in a few days this barbaric outfit. I have managed to force the F.O. (at least Passant) to commit himself after much trouble on the questions we have frequently discussed. Did you send him an offprint of your article as there appear to have occurred (on the surface) radical changes in policy[?]. I am quite convinced that Passant is subjectively honest: I also am convinced he has been fooled. The edition we are producing for the Germans is so appalling that I have instructed him not to put my name on the volume concerned – also on our English volume in which the preface is scandalously tendentious, and the footnotes and indices careless beyond belief. I shall bring you advance proof copies for your amusement.85
Did ‘the questions we have frequently discussed’ refer to the Windsor papers? It is quite possible that they did, but it is also possible that he was referring to something much bigger – perhaps much closer to the 400 documents he alleged – for the Windsor papers comprised only the third of three volumes on Anglo-German relations. The first volume, covering the period prior to May 1939 (and therefore including the Munich Agreement) had already disappeared, probably before the end of 1946, and has never been found. Sontag believed that both the first and the third volumes had been deliberately suppressed by the British86 – and, as we have seen, the third (Windsor) volume was restored in 1947 only at the insistence of the British editor-in-chief.
Butterfield never referred to the missing documents in either the two versions of his official history article or anywhere else, and he seems to have been anxious to cover both Williams’s tracks and his own. Williams’s letter of 15 July would have arrived at the same time as Butterfield was taking delivery of the offprints of his Studies article. He had not sent a copy to Passant, but he appears to have done so immediately after receiving Williams’s letter. For in Butterfield’s ‘official history’ file there is a draft covering letter to Passant dated 16 July 1949: it is not clear whether a final version was sent. Handwritten and with a large section crossed out, it is more than usually apologetic in tone and reluctant to cause offence. It reads in part:
It must seem pompous and over-important if I send a covering letter with the enclosed; but owing to your Foreign Office position I had misgivings about sending it, lest it should look like a naughty, provocative, arrogant school-boy-gesture; while I was equally concerned that if you should happen to hear of it from anybody else, my not sending it would seem careless and not very friendly. I can’t pretend that you ought to be burdened with it but I think I ought to send it to you – which I do privately, not in your official capacity.87
Whether the letter was sent or not, it confirms Butterfield’s ambivalent state of mind at the time his article was published.88 Having poked a stick into the hornet’s nest of official history, he was fearful of getting stung by the reaction of ‘people whom I like and have reason to be grateful to’ (as he put it in the deleted section of his draft). Williams seems to have been equally apprehensive that he had gone too far. Congratulating Butterfield on his article (‘I have not read better on the subject ever’), he ‘regret[ted] deeply that a comparatively unknown journal like Studies should have captured it. However perhaps for me it was better!’89 Nevertheless, the story of the Windsor documents seemed to have reached a satisfactory conclusion with the decision that they would be published. Butterfield and Williams were not to know that within a few years the threat to suppress them would be repeated at an even higher level.
There is no space to recount the full story here, except to note that it began in July 1953 and involved both the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the US President, Dwight D. Eisenhower; but that the real impetus to prevent publication of the Windsor documents came from the recently widowed Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, abetted by Wheeler-Bennett, now the official biographer of the late King George VI, who had evidently been persuaded to change sides.90 While the American editorial team resisted strongly, in Britain the brunt was borne by the Hon. Margaret Lambert, who had taken over as editor-in-chief in 1951. The matter was not finally resolved until 1957, when volume X of series D of DGFP was published.91 It included all eighteen Windsor documents: by this time too many people in the United States, Germany and elsewhere knew of their existence for concealment to be possible any longer, and the British government had to be satisfied with a disclaimer downplaying the importance of the documents and emphasizing that the Duke of Windsor ‘never wavered in his loyalty to the British cause’.92 Margaret Lambert’s private papers provide a unique insight into the affair, including the only known copy of her report of her meeting with Churchill on 16 September 1953.93 More importantly for our purpose, however, they provide conclusive evidence that Desmond Williams knew what was going on. On 9 July 1953 Lambert wrote to the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir William Strang, reporting a conversation with Professor Bernadotte Schmitt, US editor-in-chief from July 1949 to July 1952. ‘Speaking, he said, as a sincere friend of this country’, Schmitt ‘most strongly advise[d] against any attempt to withhold or even delay, publication of these papers’ and adduced many arguments in support of that advice, including the following:
He also reminded me that a former member of the editorial staff was now in Dublin. He had suspected him before of making trouble for his old colleagues and was convinced he would do it again if we gave him any sort of handle.94
This warning did not prevent Schmitt from having lunch with Desmond Williams when he met him in Dublin a few days later.95 Between 1949 and 1953, however, the Windsor affair had lain dormant, offering Williams no opportunity to make trouble. And it was precisely in that interval that Butterfield had revised his official history article for publication in History and Human Relations. The alarmist notes about the German document project sounded in the original article were absent from the revised version. It will be recalled that in 1949, when discussing the absence of minutes in the published British documents, he had written: ‘We shall be alert to discover whether the same principles are adopted in the publication of the captured German documents.’96 By 1951 this had become:
Some of us waited jealously to see whether in the case of the publication of the captured German documents the same principles would be adopted as have been employed in the selection of our own diplomatic papers. They have not; and those who care to disentangle the ordinary diplomatic correspondence from the more confidential type of document in the volumes of German papers can judge the measure of the importance of the revelations which only come from the particular kind of material that we are here discussing.97
This was why Paul Sweet was surprised by Butterfield’s choice of DGFP to illustrate the dangers of official history. From Butterfield’s point of view, Documents on German Foreign Policy was a model of official history at its best. Published in 1951, his chapter in History and Human Relations ironically gave a more reassuring picture of the German documents project than the facts warranted.
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1 Although it was also the first salvo in his war of attrition against Lewis Namier: see David Hayton, Conservative Revolutionary: The Lives of Lewis Namier (Manchester, 2019), pp. 366–75.
2 Bentley, Butterfield, p. 223.
3 Ibid., p. 251.
4 As listed in McIntire, Butterfield, pp. 475–6.
5 Michael Bentley, ‘Herbert Butterfield and the ethics of historiography’, History and Theory, xliv (Feb. 2005), 55–71 (p. 59).
6 See the examples quoted in note 3 above (from Studies, p. 130; Human Relations, pp. 185–6).
7 Taylor’s reviews are helpfully collected in Struggles for Supremacy: Diplomatic Essays by A.J.P. Taylor, ed. Chris Wrigley (Aldershot, 2000).
8 Keith Wilson, ‘Introduction: Governments, historians, and “historical engineering”’, in Forging the Collective Memory: Governments and International Relations Through Two World Wars, ed. Wilson (Providence, RI, and London, 1996), pp. 1–27. For earlier responses, see R.F.V. Heuston, review of War Crimes Trials, vols 4 and 5 (The Hadamar and Natzweiler Trials) and Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals, vols 10–13, International Law Quarterly, iii (Apr. 1950), 307–9 (p. 309); Frank Spencer, ‘The publication of British and German diplomatic documents for the period of the inter-war years’, History, xlvii (1962), 254–86 (p. 258).
9 Paul Sharp, ‘Herbert Butterfield, the English school and the civilizing virtues of diplomacy’, International Affairs, lxxix (Jul. 2003), 855–78 (p. 868).
10 Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Policing the past: Official history, secrecy and British intelligence since 1945’, English Historical Review, cxix (Sept. 2004), 922–53. In this article Professor Aldrich writes (p. 929): ‘The person who came closest to sounding the alarm was Sir Herbert Butterfield. Ten years after the war [sic] he issued a strident warning about such official history. Well-connected, but ultimately denied an opportunity to join the privileged ranks of official historians, Butterfield in all probability knew about the Ultra secret. He warned: “I must say that I do not personally believe there is a government in Europe which wants the public to know the truth.” He then explained how the mechanisms of secrecy and government claims of “openness” worked in tandem. “Firstly, that governments press upon the historian the key to all the drawers but one, and are anxious to spread the belief that this single one contains no secret importance: secondly, that if the historian can only find out the thing which the government does not want him to know, he will lay his hand upon something that is likely to be significant.” In retrospect, this is a comment on Ultra as the “missing dimension” of the official histories the war. It also stands as a salutary warning to scholars working in the wake of any major conflict who feed only upon material available from official sources.’ Butterfield was certainly well connected, and it is possible that he was aware of the Ultra secret, but the German diplomatic documents seem a much more immediate and better-documented source for his concern.
11 This is the title given by Butterfield (Studies, p. 129). Michael Kennedy has pointed out (email to author of 6 February 2020) that ‘There is no specific “Historical Society” in UCD – the Literary and Historical Society is one of the prestigious debating societies, the History Society is the society for history students and then there is the Ireland-wide Irish Historical Society. To speak at the IHS would be a much bigger deal than at the two former.’ On balance, however, I feel that the History Society remains the most probable venue.
12 McIntire, Butterfield, p. 169, states that Butterfield ‘arranged with his Irish historian friends to read the piece in Dublin in December 1948, and exacted their promise of immediate publication in an Irish journal’. This is quite possible, although I have discovered no evidence for either of these claims in Butterfield’s papers at Cambridge University Library. McIntire enjoyed access to materials, including diaries, that are not publicly available, but the suggestion that Butterfield exacted a promise of immediate publication does not seem to square with his correspondence with the editor of Studies: see note 52 below.
13 Butterfield to Taylor, 2 August 1949, Cambridge University Library, Butterfield papers, BUTT/130/4 (material from this collection is hereafter cited as BUTT). The ‘seamy side’ recurs in Butterfield’s letter to W.N. Medlicott of 8 August 1949, BUTT/130/4.
14 Butterfield to Williams, 3 May 1978 (unsigned draft), BUTT/531/W/385. It is impossible to tell whether this draft was actually sent.
15 For the origins of the War Cabinet’s official histories programme, see S.S. Wilson, The Cabinet Office to 1945 (Public Records Handbook No. 17, London, 1975), pp. 122–30 (‘The Historical Section’). For the military series specifically, see Noble Frankland, History at War (London, 1998), pp. 40–3; for the civil series, Jose Harris, ‘Thucydides amongst the mandarins: Hancock and the World War II civil histories’, in Keith Hancock: The Legacies of an Historian, ed. D.A. Low (Carlton, Victoria, 2001), pp. 122–48.
16 Bentley, Butterfield, p. 161. Postan’s British War Production appeared in 1952; Behrens’s Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War in 1955. With some exceptions, all official histories were published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, until the privatization of HMSO in 1996.
17 Bentley, Butterfield, p. 161.
18 Uri Bialer, ‘Telling the truth to the people: Britain’s decision to publish the diplomatic papers of the inter-war period’, Historical Journal, xxvi (June 1983), 349–67; Peter J. Beck, ‘Locked in a dusty cupboard, neither accessible on the policy-makers’ desks nor cleared for early publication: Llewellyn Woodward’s official diplomatic history of the Second World War’, English Historical Review, cxxvii (Dec. 2012), 1435–70.
19 Cabinet paper of 24 January 1944, quoted in ibid., p. 1438.
20 ‘The secrets of diplomacy’, in Struggles for Supremacy, ed. Wrigley, pp. 161–7.
21 For accounts of the affair, see A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (London, 1984), p. 232; Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (New Haven and London, 2000), pp. 271–2, and p. 453, note 111; Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Historians, History at the Heart of Diplomacy: Historians in the Foreign Office, 1918–2018 (History Note No. 22, London, 2018), p. 26 <https://issuu.com/fcohistorians/docs/history_at_the_heart_of_diplomacy-w>.
22 Studies, p. 137; Human Relations, p. 206.
23 Paul R. Sweet, ‘Der Versuch amtlicher Einflussnahme auf die Edition der “Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1933–1941”. Ein Fall aus den fünfziger Jahren’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, xxxix (Apr. 1991), 265–303; Sacha Zala, Geschichte unter der Schere politischer Zensur. Amtliche Aktensammlungen im internationalen Vergleich (Munich, 2001); Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of German Archives after the Second World War (New York, 2012).
24 Eckert, Struggle for the Files, p. 35.
25 Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, pp. 270–1; Zala, Geschichte, pp. 163–6; George O. Kent, ‘The German Foreign Ministry’s archives at Whaddon Hall, 1948–58’, American Archivist, xxiv (1961), 43–54.
26 Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Friends, Enemies and Sovereigns (London, 1976), pp. 58–92. Details of editors, with their dates of service, are given at the beginning of each volume of DGFP.
27 Bentley, Butterfield, pp. 119–46.
28 Studies, p. 133; Human Relations, p. 192. For German reactions to the Allied project see Eckert, Struggle for the Files, pp. 295–302.
29 Bentley, Butterfield, pp. 136–7, 166–7.
30 Butterfield to Williams, 1 March 1945, BUTT/231/W/203.
31 His subject was ‘Pan-Germanism in Austria, 1898–1902’, under the supervision of Charles Crawley at Trinity Hall: McGuire, ‘Williams’, p. 4; Bentley, Butterfield, p. 240.
32 Bentley, Butterfield, p. 163. See also pp. 166–7, 240–1, 277. Desmond Williams gave rise to endless stories, many to do with his alleged sympathies for Nazi Germany. According to Michael Bentley, he ‘frequently carried in his jacket (they say) a signed photograph of the Führer’ (p. 163). The story I heard was that the teenage Williams conducted a correspondence with Josef Goebbels from his Dublin sickbed (he suffered throughout his life from the consequences of a childhood accident). Dermot Keogh’s suggestion – in Ireland and Europe 1919–1948 (Dublin and Totowa, NJ, 1988), p. 243 – that he was a ‘member of British intelligence during the Second World War’ seems to be a misapprehension based on a photograph of Williams in British uniform, presumably dating from his time as an editor of the German diplomatic documents in Berlin in 1947–8 (I am grateful to Dr Michael Kennedy for this information). It is confirmed by an obituary which states that, as an editor in Berlin, Williams bore ‘a nominal military rank’: James McGuire, ‘T. Desmond Williams (1921–87)’, Irish Historical Studies, xxvi (May 1988), 3–7 (p. 4).
33 Colin Welch later became a successful journalist with the Daily Telegraph, launching its ‘Way of the World’ column and serving as deputy editor for sixteen years. A footnote to Welch’s obituary in the Peterhouse Annual Record 2011/2012 (Peterhouse, Cambridge, 2016), p. 119 (note 12) gives a different, less dramatic version of the incident. James McGuire’s obituary gives an inaccurate account of the circumstances of Williams’s departure from Cambridge: McGuire, ‘Williams’, p. 4.
34 The letters were divided by Butterfield into two separate files: his ‘official history’ file, now BUTT/130 in the Butterfield papers, and his much larger file of personal correspondence, now BUTT/531. The sequence can be understood only by juxtaposing the two. McIntire, Butterfield, pp. 169–70, has done this and he provides a useful brief account of the episode, though erring when he states that it was the start of Butterfield’s friendship with Williams.
35 Williams to Butterfield, n.d. (1948), BUTT/531/W/202A.
36 Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, 1930–8; chief diplomatic adviser, 1938–40. Williams was later to make exactly the same criticism of DBFP: see p. 48 below.
37 All three historians were conservative and nationalist, and all had had complicated relationships with the Nazi regime. Both Ritter and Noack had been briefly imprisoned following the July 1944 bomb plot. However, Noack (1899–1974) had been closest to the regime, having joined the Party in 1939, and having facilitated a visit by the Norwegian National Socialist leader Vidkun Quisling to Berlin in December of that year: see Hans Fredrik Dahl, Quisling: A Study in Treachery (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 145–50. In the 1950s Noack became a prominent advocate of a united, neutralized Germany; he ended as a supporter of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD): see <https://ns-zeit.unigreifswald.de/projekt/personen/noack-ulrich> for a concise survey of his career. Noack and Butterfield had shared interests in Machiavelli and Lord Acton (on whom Noack had written his Habilitationsschrift in 1936); after the war they visited each other in Cambridge and Würzburg. Butterfield’s post-war correspondence with Noack is in BUTT 52–4, and with Ritter in BUTT 57.
38 Wheeler-Bennett, Friends, pp. 84–6; Zala, Geschichte, pp. 210–26; Eckert, Struggle for the Files, pp. 92–4.
39 The distinguished diplomatic historian Pierre Renouvin was the first French editor-in-chief. He resigned from the project early in 1948 and was succeeded by Maurice Baumont: Eckert, Struggle for the Files, p. 91; Zala, Geschichte, p. 232.
40 Yet Sontag was equally suspicious of the intentions of his British colleagues, fearing that they were attempting to suppress files that cast an unfavourable light on Britain’s policy of appeasement: Eckert, Struggle for the Files, p. 92.
41 E.L. Woodward, The Study of International Relations at a University: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 17 February 1945 (Oxford, 1945). Williams may have been referring here to Woodward’s criticism of the claim of Die Grosse Politik to offer an objective record of German foreign policy before 1914 (ibid., pp. 14–15); or to his condemnation of the German historical profession for its willingness to toe the National Socialist line: ‘how is it that the Historische Zeitschrift, with its tradition of exact scholarship, should have found German historians of former repute willing to contribute to it after it had begun to print fatuous as well as poisonous rubbish about the Jewish question?’ (ibid., p. 18).
42 Williams to Butterfield, 14 May 1948, BUTT/531/W/204.
43 Williams to Butterfield, 23 November 1948, BUTT/531/W/205.
44 On this point, Williams may have been in agreement with Sontag (note 38 above) in suspecting British efforts to suppress evidence of British appeasement of Hitler.
45 Zala, Geschichte, p. 226.
46 Butterfield to Williams, 3 December 1948, BUTT/531/W/206.
47 Williams to Butterfield, 7 December 1948, BUTT/531/W/207.
48 Studies, p. 133; Human Relations, p. 192.
49 Both the preface and the editors’ foreword can be found in the complete edition of Nazi–Soviet Relations published on the Avalon Project website: <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/nazsov.asp>.
50 Studies, p. 134. When revising the paper for History and Human Relations, however, he added a new final sentence to the paragraph: ‘The time has also come when assurances of this kind must be absolutely specific.’ Human Relations, p. 199.
51 Studies, p. 138.
52 Since there is no letter from Connolly in BUTT/130, this is deduced from Butterfield’s acceptance letter (note 53 below).
53 Butterfield to Connolly, 16 February, BUTT/130/4.
54 Butterfield to Connolly, 20 February, BUTT/130/4.
55 Both were later adapted and incorporated into the version published in History and Human Relations.
56 Ibid.
57 Butterfield to Connolly, 7 March 1949, BUTT/130/4.
58 Given the vagaries of Allied (and wartime German) microfilming efforts, this was a valid fear. See Eckert, Struggle for the Files, pp. 62–4.
59 Studies, p. 137.
60 McIntire, Butterfield, pp. 169–70, comes to the same conclusion.
61 The words in parentheses are a handwritten addition.
62 Handwritten correction of ‘would’.
63 Butterfield to Woodward, 31 July 1949, BUTT/130/4.
64 As stated in Butterfield’s letter to Williams of 1 April (note 65 below). Two undated letters from Williams were probably sent shortly after his letter of 24 March. The first, written on ‘Monday’ (28 March?) referred to Butterfield’s father’s illness, which had worsened around this time (Bentley, Butterfield, p. 266), confirmed an arrangement to meet in Brewer Street, London, at 1 p.m. on ‘Saturday’ (2 April?), and concluded: ‘I am writing a memo on the subject which I shall post you tomorrow Tuesday. It should reach you Thursday [31 March?]’: BUTT/531/W/202. In the second letter Williams wrote: ‘I have not sent you the memo – which I have prepared – as I shall be seeing General Marshall-Cornwall tomorrow – and that conversation may render out of date the memo. However I shall have a full written statement for you – when we meet on Saturday. Could you change the time to 1.15 pm?’: BUTT/130/4. Whether they met in London on 2 April is unclear, but Butterfield had already responded decisively the previous day.
65 Butterfield to Williams, Vellacott, Raven and Passant, all dated 1 April 1949, BUTT/130/4.
66 Gwynn to Butterfield, 22 September 1947, BUTT/531/G/80.
67 ‘… with his Nazi connections and a less than fulsome view of British policy towards Germany’: Bentley, Butterfield, p. 167.
68 Gwynn to Butterfield, 2 March 1948, BUTT/531/G/83.
69 Ibid.
70 Gwynn to Butterfield, 18 June 1948, BUTT/531/G/86.
71 Of 4 May 1949, BUTT/531/[unnumbered but probably W/207].
72 He was, however, preoccupied by his father’s illness at this time (note 64 above). He was also about to start delivering his lectures on Christianity and history for the BBC (Easter 1949 fell between Thursday 14 and Monday 18 April).
73 Michael Bloch, Operation Willi: The Plot to Kidnap the Duke of Windsor, July 1940 (London, 1984).
74 See the references in Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, p. 266. A fictionalized version of the story featured in the second series of The Crown on Netflix.
75 Paul Sweet’s 1991 article marked the beginning of a more scholarly approach to the Duke of Windsor story. It was then pursued by the Swiss historian Sacha Zala, who met Sweet and was given access to his private archive: see Sacha Zala, Geschichte, especially pp. 179–83, 194–5, 291–3, 308–9. The most recent account, in Eckert, Struggle for the Files, pp. 70–3, draws on Sweet and Zala, but adds important details, some based on British Foreign Office sources. Sweet later published a shorter, English-language version of his article: ‘The Windsor file’, The Historian, lix (1997), 263–79.
76 Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, pp. 270–1; Zala, Geschichte, pp. 163–6. See Wheeler-Bennett, Friends, pp. 82–3, on why the practice of microfilming was abandoned. Some of the files, including the Windsor papers, had already been microfilmed by the Germans: see Eckert, Struggle for the Files, pp. 62–4.
77 Letter from Butler to Heather Yasamee (FCO Library and Records Department), 14 June 1991, FCO Historians’ collection.
78 Minute of 17 July 1945, quoted in Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, p. 271.
79 Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, p. 273; Zala, Geschichte, pp. 179–83.
80 Wheeler-Bennett, Friends, p. 81.
81 Paul R. Sweet, letter to Professor Raymond J. Sontag, 21 August 1956, quoted in Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, p. 300. Here and in later quotations I use the English translation made by Eleanor Breuning, a British member of the German documents team, for internal Foreign Office use, 29 May 1991 (copy in FCO Historians’ collection).
82 Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, p. 279.
83 Ibid., p. 279.
84 Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945, series D, vol. X, The War Years June 23– August 31, 1940 (London, 1957), nos 2, 9, 66, 86, 152, 159, 175, 211, 216, 224, 235, 254, 257, 264, 265, 276, 277, 285.
85 Williams to Butterfield, 15 July 1949, BUTT/531/W207A. Williams’s criticisms of DGFP’s editorial standards are echoed in Gerhard L. Weinberg, ‘Critical note on the Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945’, Journal of Modern History, xxiii (1951), 38–40.
86 Sontag, letter of 2 January 1947, quoted in Eckert, Struggle for the Files, p. 92. Interestingly, a letter from a US official noting the disappearance of this volume is dated 22 March 1948, only two days before Williams’s letter to Butterfield.
87 Butterfield to Passant, 16 July 1949 (draft), BUTT/130/4.
88 Passant did receive the article. In his letter of thanks of 8 August he suggested meeting in Cambridge to discuss it: BUTT/130/4.
89 Williams to Butterfield, 15 July 1949, BUTT/531/W207A.
90 Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, pp. 295–6.
91 Note 84 above.
92 Sweet, ‘Einflussnahme’, p. 296.
93 Lambert to the Marquess of Salisbury (acting foreign secretary), 17 September 1953, Lambert papers (private collection).
94 Lambert to Strang, 9 July 1953, Lambert papers (private collection). Strang replied the same day, noting that he had ‘taken the liberty of sending a copy of it [i.e. her letter] to Chartwell’: ibid.
95 Schmitt to Lambert, 16 July 1953 (from Cork, waiting to sail from Cobh on the Mauretania): ibid.
96 Studies, p. 138.
97 Human Relations, p. 204.