Prologue

Nearly fifty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Peterhouse, Cambridge, I would occasionally see the small figure of the former Master of the College, Sir Herbert Butterfield, walking across the grass of Old Court. The thought of accosting him would never have crossed my mind, and I remained just as diffident after I became a research student in 1974. Yet if I had spoken to Sir Herbert I might have learned something of value, and I knew that at the time. For I had started to study the complex and unedifying history of British plans for military action in Scandinavia in 1939–40. My friend Denis Smyth (now emeritus professor at the University of Toronto) had spoken to Sir Herbert, who had recalled the time when he was visited during the war by the eminent historian and former Foreign Minister of Norway Professor Halvdan Koht. I know now that the visit took place in February 1941, just before Koht, recently deposed as Foreign Minister in the Norwegian government in exile, went into a second exile in the United States.¹ Koht told Butterfield, so Denis reported, that when Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, Britain had been on the verge of doing the same thing. Of course, I already knew that Britain had evolved some sort of plan for military action in Norway at that time; nevertheless it was striking to have the case stated so bluntly, and by such a significant source. I never followed it up.

The connection between Koht and Butterfield was Harold Temperley, Butterfield’s doctoral supervisor and Koht’s friend and collaborator in the International Committee of Historical Sciences, who had died prematurely in July 1939, just over a year after his (Temperley’s) election as Master of Peterhouse. The connection between Denis Smyth and Butterfield was Desmond Williams, Professor of Modern History at University College Dublin. Despite the ostensible differences in their personalities, Butterfield’s friendship with this ‘gifted, charming, drunken, aggressive, unstable, unreliable Irishman’ (in the words of Butterfield’s latest biographer) was one of the closest and most important of his life.² Williams was an inspiring if exasperating teacher who sent generations of students to pursue their PhD studies at Peterhouse, usually (and wisely) under the supervision of members of other colleges (both Denis and I were supervised by Professor Harry Hinsley of St John’s). Desmond visited Peterhouse frequently and would hold court in the small guest bedroom behind the porter’s lodge. I got to know him quite well and can testify to his brilliance and charm, as well as his personal kindness: I had forgotten until recently that it was his reference that secured me a place at the Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz (another Butterfield/Williams connection) in 1977. I was not exposed to Desmond’s less admirable qualities.

Although Butterfield remained a remote and, to me, intimidating figure (already failing, he was to die in 1979), I dutifully read several of his works. I already knew his most famous and most accessible book, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931); I now sought insights in the dense narrative of The Peace Tactics of Napoleon, 1806–1809, Butterfield’s PhD thesis published in 1929, and in his 1954 Wiles Lectures, published in 1955 as Man on His Past. Around this time I also discovered a shabby copy of History and Human Relations, a collection of essays published in 1951. One chapter, ‘Official history: Its pitfalls and criteria’, spoke directly to me as a new student of modern British history, tackling official papers and publications for the first time. I was captivated by Butterfield’s subversiveness: by his hostility towards, and suspicion of, what officialdom tells us and, above all, what it does not want us to know. I can still see the passages I marked with pencil in the margin, including some that have become famous: ‘It may be necessary that official history should be produced. It is equally necessary that it should be subjected to unremitting scrutiny’; ‘I do not personally believe that there is a government in Europe which wants the public to know all the truth.’³ And, as a student trying to understand conflict between Britain and Germany, it came as a revelation when Butterfield described that conflict as a mere thirty-year interlude in the longer confrontation between Britain and Russia.

Many years later, I became an official historian myself: the direct successor of Temperley and others as an editor of British diplomatic documents. For a long time after that, I was too busy to dwell on the implications of turning from poacher to gamekeeper; but, looking for something to keep me occupied during a period of convalescence, I returned to Butterfield. Living in Cambridge, I checked the Butterfield papers at the University Library and found a file entitled ‘Official History’. It seemed promising, and it was. I later discovered much more, including his extensive correspondence with Desmond Williams. All this material, of course, was well known to Butterfield’s biographers and the growing body of Butterfield scholars.⁴ I nevertheless became intrigued by the way in which his views on official history seemed to have evolved from early misgivings, at the time when he was close to Harold Temperley, to fierce suspicion under the influence of his new friend Desmond Williams. Untangling that relationship became a detective story of the kind that Butterfield relished, eventually bumping up against one of the more tenacious conspiracy theories of the post-war era: what the Duke of Windsor might or might not have been up to in Spain and Portugal in the summer of 1940.

My version of that story occupies the first chapter of this book. But I also wanted to discover what Butterfield actually thought and wrote about official history. That meant, on the one hand, looking at his correspondence with some of the leading historians of his day, official and unofficial – including E.L. Woodward, W.N. Medlicott and A.J.P. Taylor – and, on the other, analysing what he wrote in the two versions of his chapter: the original version published in the Irish journal Studies in 1949⁵ and the revised version that appeared two years later.⁶ That task takes up my second chapter. I then examine what happened to official history in the decades after Butterfield published his article, focusing on the wartime and peacetime narrative histories and the British and German documentary series. In the final chapter I end with some reflections on what Butterfield’s admonitions might mean for official history today. Official history as it existed for much of the twentieth century – with the inauguration of the Cabinet Office’s official history series in 1908 and the Foreign Office’s publication of diplomatic documents on the origins of the war in 1924 – may be under threat. But governments have recently been given many reminders that history matters; and it is Butterfield above all who reminds us that we need to remain vigilant in monitoring how they respond to the challenge.

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¹ Åsmund Svendsen, Halvdan Koht. Veien mot framtiden. En biografi (Oslo, 2013), p. 365.

² Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God (Cambridge, 2011), p. 163.

³ Herbert Butterfield, ‘Official history: Its pitfalls and criteria’, in History and Human Relations (London, 1951), pp. 182–224 (quoted from pp. 185–6).

⁴ See, in addition to Michael Bentley, C.T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven and London, 2004).

⁵ Herbert Butterfield, ‘Official history: Its pitfalls and its criteria’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, xxxviii (June 1949), 129–44.

⁶ The two versions are hereafter cited as Studies and Human Relations: together if the quotation is identical, or nearly so; separately if the quotation appears only in one version.