2. Butterfield and official history

Butterfield and the historians

By mid-July 1949 Butterfield was busy distributing offprints of his Studies article to many of the most eminent members of the British historical profession (Lewis Namier seems to have been a notable omission), and he was soon receiving their replies. Most of them were standard, expressing gratitude, interest and so on.¹ Patrick Bury wrote from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: ‘It reinforces me in my hope that I shall never myself become an “official” or “independent” historian!’ Some years later he was to become one of the editors of Documents on British Foreign Policy. Among those who sent more substantial replies were E.L. Woodward, W.N. Medlicott, the official historian of the Ministry of Economic Warfare during the Second World War (a fact of which Butterfield, strangely, was unaware when he sent him his offprint) and A.J.P. Taylor.

It is not surprising that Taylor was the one most in sympathy with Butterfield’s views, thanking him for having highlighted the ‘dangers’ of official history and recalling the furore that had surrounded his critical review of the first volume of the second series of DBFP in 1947.² He did, however, ‘disagree strongly’ with Butterfield’s idealized view of the international historians of the 1920s, whose impartiality Butterfield had contrasted with the ideologically coloured history of the 1930s onwards which had led to a return ‘of the primitive, garbled, war-time versions of the origins of the war of 1914’.³ Their mistake, in Taylor’s view, was to have relied too heavily on the German documents published in the Grosse Politik, which he knew from careful study to have been ‘dangerously misleading, sometimes deliberately’. In his brief reply Butterfield wrote, as quoted near the beginning of this book, ‘I am as a historian against all governments’, consciously or unconsciously employing exactly the same words as Taylor had used of himself. Yet his correspondence with Woodward and Medlicott shows that he was in fact a less implacable opponent.

Woodward wrote two long letters to Butterfield, both verging on the illegible, with many afterthoughts squeezed between lines or in the margins.⁴ Both were frank and friendly; both contained a strong defence of his editorship of the British diplomatic documents on impeccably honest and pragmatic grounds.⁵ There was, he wrote, one thing he always had in mind:

He went on to stress the editorial independence and lack of official interference that he and Butler enjoyed:

Indeed it was Woodward who had come up with the publication programme and pressed it on the Foreign Office, not the other way round; and after some difficulty – with politicians, not officials – had it accepted:

Nor was there official interference in the selection of documents: the main difficulty, in fact, was in getting busy officials to read them once they had been prepared for publication. The editors were clear that they, and not the Foreign Office, had the last word:

He added, however, that the Foreign Office had called attention to a few personal references that might ‘cause offence to living people outside this country’; but ‘ In every case – and there are not many cases – where we have cut anything out, we have put a footnote to this effect.’

The Foreign Office continued to insist on maintaining the practice of showing to foreign governments any documents emanating from them; but no government had refused so far. ‘This is the question’, Woodward recalled,

Woodward had much more to say in his letter. He commented quite sharply on the content of Butterfield’s article which, he said, lumped together

He then went on to discuss his row with Taylor (about which he remained bitter), gave more explanation of the principles behind his selection of documents, and finally thanked Butterfield for his ‘kindness – wh. I do appreciate in spite of my argufying – in sending it to me’.

Butterfield’s reply to Woodward was convoluted and bordered on the obsequious at times; but it did help to clarify the intentions behind his article.⁷ ‘What I really had in mind’, he wrote, ‘was the relation of the State to history’. He had deliberately drawn his ‘examples indiscriminately, with the effect of jumbling together things whose separate nature from a different point of view I am aware of ’. His concern was

Butterfield acknowledged the need for official history and did not doubt the honesty of Woodward and his colleagues; but, he said, there was always the possibility that they might make ‘half-conscious slips’. And, as quoted earlier, he believed that the case of the German documents showed that the Foreign Office might trust some editors less than others, with the implication that they would not enjoy such a free hand. There followed a tortuous discussion of the Foreign Office’s attitude to the control of information in which, despite all his circumlocutions, Butterfield got to the heart of the problem of official history. For the official historian possesses a privileged access denied to others: we have to take what he or she says on trust. Woodward was an honest man, Butterfield acknowledged, but others might be less honest. Official history must therefore always fall short of academic history because it is impossible to check all its sources:

Woodward’s second letter was less defensive and contained insights that any subsequent editor of the British documents would recognize. He drew a distinction between narrative official histories and the publication of official documents.⁸ As well as being editor of DBFP, Woodward was writing a history of British foreign policy during the Second World War.⁹ Here he took the line that, ‘on the basis of all the material’, he was ‘free to write as I please’; that the Cabinet Office and Foreign Office were free to decide whether to publish what he had written; and that if they did so they must publish it all without alteration. The only constraint was that of ‘revealing Cabinet discussions & differences of opinion, while the people concerned are alive & active’, bearing in mind the need to maintain Cabinet responsibility. Publishing Foreign Office documents was a different matter. Woodward thought that there was ‘a line to be drawn between the record of the execution of policy, & the record of the formulation of policy’, although he admitted that it was blurred. But this very fact meant that in ‘giving an account of what Br. Policy was & how it was carried out’ (for example in volume I of series I) he was really giving ‘a great deal of information abt. the formulation of naval policy, & later vols. even more abt. our policy on reparations & German claims’.

To publish more documents on the actual formulation of policy would run up against the problem of scale – a problem greater than anything faced by Gooch and Temperley. No account would be complete without the inclusion of Cabinet minutes, which had not been kept before the First World War. As for Foreign Office minutes, there had been many fewer before the war but then ‘the top people wrote more’, while ‘they now write v. little & most of it is executive stuff, not statements of opinion’.¹⁰ There was also the problem of content. Although the Foreign Office had not been asked explicitly for permission to publish ‘ all their policy-making stuff’, Woodward thought that they would, if challenged, say no,

As for the German documents,

Here, as we have seen, Woodward may have been economical with the truth.¹¹

Norton Medlicott, as forthcoming as Woodward but unbruised by encounters with hostile reviewers, offered a more measured response to Butterfield’s arguments (helped, perhaps, by the fact that his letters were typed rather than handwritten), and he undermined most of them by the application of relentless common sense and good humour. In his first letter Medlicott challenged Butterfield’s reference to ‘motives of raison d’état, the public advantage, secret drawers, and then (in case we protest that we are not conscious that things are being withheld) the gullibility of official historians, lulled to sleep by the soft charms of officialdom’:

Medlicott dated ‘these constant suspicions of official hanky-panky’ to the last era when diplomacy really had been secret, before the First World War. Since 1919, however, there had been ‘Broadly speaking … no secrets’:

Turning to the publication of minutes, Medlicott repeated many of the points Woodward had made, reinforcing them with his own experience of reading the ‘pages of notes and speculations and arguments’ that accompanied every telegram that arrived in the office, at the end of which ‘something begins to emerge, and the official who is responsible for sending off a reply generally tells the man who has been smart enough to say something sensible, “please draft tel. on lines above” or words to that effect’. He agreed that ‘from going through all this stuff you learn a great deal … but it is also very tedious and often silly, and you must have some short cuts’. It would simply not be practicable to publish everything, and ‘the real problem of all historical study after say 1800 is to wade through the endless masses of paper – particularly is this true in diplomacy. I don’t want any more paper thrust on me in the job I am on now – I want on the other hand some machinery for sorting it all out.’

Medlicott ended with a strong defence of Woodward’s editorial work:

In his reply to Medlicott, Butterfield refused to yield on what he regarded as the key point.¹³ Woodward’s work was important but it did not tell the whole story. That story could not be fully understood ‘without studying the policy-making material’. None of the materials provided so far would provide insight into, for example, the part played by Vansittart in the making of British foreign policy before the Second World War. Nor did the available documents reveal ‘the maximum of the offers we made to Russia in 1939’. Butterfield accepted that such material might ‘be not easily publishable yet, but when I am presented with the case that we made these offers to Russia because we expected them to be rejected, I want the kind of materials that will enable me to answer that question’. He repeated that it was ‘not really a question of honesty or dishonesty that is in question, though from what I can judge there is a seamy side to all government [that phrase again!], and it lies precisely at the lower level I want to get at’. And again Butterfield reiterated his warning that, although the present generation of historians might be honest, ‘the next generation will be liable not to be’.

Medlicott’s response again challenged one of Butterfield’s central premises.¹⁴ Even when archives were fully open, whether public or private, they never contained ‘all’ the documents, and all those who used the archives understood that fact, either explicitly or implicitly.

The main reason why archives were not open (apart from the convention that one must not publish documents about negotiations with foreign governments without their consent) was not to conceal discreditable truths but to preserve the anonymity of public servants. ‘When we say that the FO archives are open down to 1902 we mean of course that the government feels that the anonymity rule need not apply any longer before that date – not that everything is available.’

Medlicott went on to challenge another of Butterfield’s cherished beliefs: the editorial independence of Gooch and Temperley. As far as he could see, they had been on exactly the same footing as Woodward and Butler: ‘“outside” historians, not members of the permanent FO staff’.

He concluded: ‘Of course there is a further point which we tend to forget – that the really vital ideas are often not put on paper at all, because they emerge in conversation between the head men.’¹⁵

Medlicott urged Butterfield not to bother to reply, and he evidently took him at his word. By the middle of August 1949 letters of thanks for his Studies article had dried up. Having asked the editor at the end of July for thirty extra offprints, ‘as the article has brought to light attempts to prevent the publication here of criticisms of official history’, he wrote to the printers a month later that ‘the time has rather passed for circulating my article on Official History any further, so I have decided not to ask for any more off-prints now’.¹⁶ By October Butterfield had changed his mind again and was asking for ten copies of the June 1949 issue of Studies, though there is no indication whether they were sent or received.¹⁷ Could this renewed interest have been connected with an article by Desmond Williams on ‘Some aspects of contemporary history’ that appeared in the Cambridge Journal in September?¹⁸ Published on the eve of taking up his professorship in Dublin, Williams’s article had much in common with Butterfield’s, notably in deprecating the willingness of modern historians to

The difference, of course, lay in the fact that Williams spoke from direct experience, though no hint of that fact appeared in his article. Characteristically, the aspects that particularly disturbed him were those where German wartime documents and the recently published memoirs of Churchill and others shed a sinister light on Allied conduct during the war, and their efforts to suppress consideration of such conduct by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Butterfield took notes on the article, focusing on the subject to which he had been alerted by Halvdan Koht in 1941 and to which he and Williams were to return with zeal in the early 1950s: the suggestion that the German invasion of Norway in April 1940 had merely forestalled a British invasion that was already under way.²⁰

By now Butterfield was about to take up his Princeton sabbatical, and it would not have been surprising if official history, along with other preoccupations, had fallen away under the stimulus of that bracing intellectual environment. Instead, Princeton allowed Butterfield to reflect further on the subject, since it was during this time that he conceived a plan for collecting together some of the pieces he had written since the war, including his Studies article, in the volume that became History and Human Relations in 1951.²¹ But reflection did not mean that Butterfield had modified his opinions in the light of the reassuring arguments of Woodward and Medlicott. If anything, they had been reinforced.

The perihelion of Mercury

So far, we have seen Butterfield’s views as mediated by the criticism of other historians. It is time to look directly at the two versions of his article and to work out what he thought the criteria and pitfalls of official history actually were. Let us start with a passage already partially quoted:

The sentence is typical Butterfield: starting diffidently and with one of his habitual double negatives, it ends with a memorable punchline. We have already seen many indications of Butterfield’s scepticism towards government and its efforts to manage the past. To what extent, if at all, did his views change between the two versions of his article published in 1949 and 1951?

First, however, we need to look back to his early intellectual development under the tutelage of Harold Temperley: for it was in this period, according to Michael Bentley, that his scepticism was rooted. For Butterfield, expressions of filial piety towards Temperley were routine, usually coupled with disparaging comments on Temperley’s long-standing rival, Charles Webster. In 1943, for example, he lamented to a visiting Norwegian historian the

Yet Bentley makes a persuasive case that Butterfield’s scepticism was directed towards Temperley just as much as towards official history. On arriving at Peterhouse in 1919, Butterfield’s first encounter with Temperley had gone very badly. It was only Paul Vellacott’s kindness that rescued his undergraduate career – and it was only after reading one of his first essays that Temperley started to take serious notice of him. Temperley then became ‘a dominant force in his undergraduate life’ and later his postgraduate supervisor. But, in Bentley’s view, it is too easy to assume that Butterfield owed everything to Temperley’s teaching ‘and had his mind formed in Temperley’s mould’, for this ignores the fact ‘that Butterfield was very clever indeed and that Temperley was not’. In notes for the biography that he could never bring himself to write, Butterfield wrote that Temperley had ‘the heart of a child’. He was a ‘boisterous schoolboy’, ‘a sentimentalist’.²⁴ Butterfield, Bentley writes, detected that ‘Temperley’s intellectual posturing had a hollow centre’.²⁵ Although unwilling to admit it publicly, he was equally sceptical of the kind of official history that Temperley was producing in his capacity as co-editor of the British documents, at the same time as he was supervising Butterfield’s training as a diplomatic historian. As with the man so with the work: the nostalgia for the historians of the late 1920s that Butterfield expressed when writing to Taylor is deceptive. Convinced that history was worth studying only for its own sake, not for its imagined usefulness to civic life, Butterfield reacted against the ‘new’ diplomatic history as practised by Temperley and, especially, Webster, with its claim to learn ‘lessons’ from the Congress of Vienna that could be applied to Versailles, the League of Nations and so on.²⁶ As he was to write much later, ‘What you have to avoid in 1919 are not the mistakes of 1815 but the mistakes of 1919.’²⁷ By the time he had completed his first and only essay in the discipline, Butterfield had rejected diplomatic history itself. ‘There is something in the history of diplomacy which inclines to be cold and forbidding, and lacks the full-blooded leap of the larger story of human lives,’ he wrote in the conclusion to The Peace Tactics of Napoleon, 1806–1809, published in 1929.²⁸

At the end of the war, Butterfield’s belief in the absolute primacy of academic historical enquiry remained unshaken. He reacted indignantly to a proposal by the Air Ministry that research assistants working on the official history of the war in the air might be permitted to submit their work for research degrees at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge.²⁹ This, he thought, was just another example of ‘the growing power (in these matters) of the state, which has been putting out its tentacles and tightening its grip upon us’.³⁰ Yet Butterfield accepted the use of history by government as long as it did not encroach on the academic sphere. He agreed with his Peterhouse colleague, the archaeologist Grahame Clark, then working for the Air Ministry, that it should be encouraged to ‘establish an Historical Section, which should have its place in the elaboration of strategy, in Staff College training etc.’ (and, incidentally, help to allay the Air Ministry’s ‘jealousy of the Admiralty’, whose historical traditions were more firmly established).³¹

Butterfield’s Studies article therefore drew upon deep-seated views about the nature of history and the role of the state, reinforced by evidence from the war and the immediate post-war period of a growing interest in history on the part of the British government which might ostensibly be well-meaning, but – as Desmond Williams had revealed – might serve more malign purposes. In his article Butterfield started by insisting that ‘an independent science of history’ was an essential component of freedom of thought. But it was in danger of being compromised when independent historians placed themselves at the service of government, however patriotic their motives.³² Butterfield went on to express his belief that no government wanted the public to know all the truth – if it did, it had ‘only to open its archive to the free play of scholarship’ – and adumbrated two maxims that followed from such unwillingness. First was the existence of a ‘secret drawer’. ‘Governments’, Butterfield claimed, ‘try to press upon the historian the keys to all the drawers but one, and are very anxious to spread the belief that this single one contains no secret of importance.’ ‘Secondly,’ he went on, ‘if the historian can only find out the thing which government does not want him to know, he will lay his hand upon something that is likely to be significant.’³³

The secret drawer was a conviction from which Butterfield never wavered: Medlicott’s good-humoured denial of its existence made no impression. Interestingly, Medlicott quoted Butterfield on the subject in his inaugural lecture as Stevenson Professor of International History at LSE in 1955. He also quoted Lord Acton’s claim that ‘one key is always excepted’; and suggested that Acton, a historian who preoccupied Butterfield for the whole of his working life, might have been the source of his belief.³⁴ Yet the instances in which Butterfield claimed to detect the phenomenon were startlingly few. Indeed there is only one clear example in international affairs, cited in both versions of his official history article and discussed at greater length in the lectures that became Man on His Past in 1955: the claim by Frederick the Great in 1756 that he had opened the Seven Years’ War on discovering a dangerous conspiracy against him on the part of Austria and Russia.³⁵ It was only when the Russian archives were opened, as late as 1912, that the conspiracy was proved to have been ‘more dangerous than Frederick ever knew’: ‘Only when the last drawer was unlocked did we discover that what required to be explained was a certain gullibility that Frederick had shown in the period when the conspiracy was being developed.’³⁶

In the main body of his article Butterfield developed the arguments that, as we have seen, provoked the most dissent from Woodward and Medlicott: that Gooch and Temperley had held ‘a peculiarly independent position’ as editors of the British Documents; that the dispassionate historiography of the 1920s had been supplanted by ideologically driven interpretations of the war’s origin; that the Second World War had witnessed an intensified race by governments to state their case through official histories or the publication of official documents; and that the post-war editing of German and British documents by nominally independent historians fell short of the high standard set by their British predecessors after the First World War. The problem, Butterfield went on, was that the outside reader had no way of knowing ‘the machinery or the series of processes’ through which documents were selected and who, other than historians, had a say in that selection.³⁷

This was a point amplified in the version of the article published in History and Human Relations in 1951. ‘It would even be useful’, Butterfield wrote in a new sentence, ‘if all the rules governing the work of official historians could be published; since it is conceivable, for example, that regulations restricting certain powers or privileges to a chief editor would raise an issue of some significance.’³⁸ The later version also elaborated Butterfield’s suggestion that official historians practised what we would now term self-censorship. It would be a mistake, Butterfield claimed in another addition to the original text, to imagine that modern governments needed to rely on direct censorship to ensure that their version of the truth reached the public.

Old-fashioned censorship had been

Might we read these additions as an implicit rejoinder to Woodward and Medlicott?

The 1951 version also showed that Butterfield remained unpersuaded by Woodward’s justification for the exclusion of Foreign Office minutes from Documents on British Foreign Policy. On the contrary, he elaborated his argument that such minutes were essential to understanding ‘the history of the way in which British foreign policy came to be arrived at and formulated’.⁴⁰ He admitted that there might be good reasons for not publishing policy-making material so soon after the events in question; but their absence must arouse the suspicion that ‘officialdom’ had reasons for not wanting it to be published. Here again, Butterfield came in his roundabout way to the heart of the matter. For he believed that it was only through access to such material that it was possible to identify the real makers of policy: not the Foreign Secretary but ‘the higher permanent officials of the Foreign Office’ (he was presumably thinking of figures like Vansittart) who, if they could not ‘force their policy on a Foreign Secretary’, were at any rate ‘strong enough to prevent him from carrying out any other policy of his own’:⁴¹

The most substantial transformation of the original article came in a section that brought Butterfield’s arguments together in a remarkable synthesis.⁴³ To show that we must always be prepared for some new fact ‘which will challenge our inelasticities of mind and shake the validities of things we never thought to question’,⁴⁴ Butterfield drew attention to some Foreign Office minutes from July 1914 in the published British documents which might never have been printed and, in that case, ‘would hardly have been missed’, but which cast an entirely new light on British preoccupations. For what they showed was that in 1914 senior officials were at least as worried about Russia as about Germany, perhaps more so. Butterfield also pointed to two omissions from the published documents, both relating to Russia, and noted that the introduction by Sir James Headlam-Morley, historical adviser to the Foreign Office, again sought to guide the reader to a particular view of ‘the Russian side of the question’.⁴⁵ Fear of Russian power had been a nineteenth-century obsession, and was again an obsession in the early years of the Cold War. In that perspective, conflict with Germany was no more than a ‘curious interlude of some thirty years from 1914’.⁴⁶ Inelasticity of mind, reinforced by the way in which the British documents had been edited after both world wars – what was included in the published volumes and what was not included – had led to a distorted view of Britain’s international situation in the first half of the twentieth century. We must now ask ourselves, Butterfield wrote, ‘whether for thirty years we have not construed our contemporary history within too narrow a framework’:

Such passages help to explain why A.J.P. Taylor felt able to lump Butterfield along with those in the United States and Great Britain who had advocated sitting tight while Germany and Russia fought each other to destruction.⁴⁷ In fact Butterfield was saying something much less crude. By favouring one ‘monstrous ogre’ over the other, Britain had contradicted one of the deepest principles of British foreign policy: that it should ‘fight any single power that threatened to dominate the Continent’, but not ‘so to destroy one of the giants that half a continent was left at the good or bad intentions of the other’.⁴⁸ The mission to destroy Germany had been conducted so relentlessly through two world wars that it had left no space for ‘the difficult obligation of keeping two areas of force in our survey at once, two dangers in mind at the same time’, and the result had been the domination of half a continent by the Soviet Union.⁴⁹ And the danger of official history was that it would legitimate only one view of the course of events over the last thirty years – the ‘Foreign Office view of history’ – ignoring, suppressing or simply failing to notice evidence that might point to alternative interpretations.⁵⁰ All this was a long way beyond the dusty metaphor of the secret drawer, not to mention the minutiae of the Windsor papers; and to illuminate his point Butterfield drew on his new understanding of the history of science. In what Michael Bentley has described as ‘a brilliant passage’, Butterfield brought science and history together in an ‘extraordinary metaphor’:⁵¹

For Butterfield, it was precisely the fact that ‘there were two things which people ought to have been thinking about at once’ – Russia as well as Germany – that official history had concealed but which, once discovered, constituted ‘the historian’s perihelion of Mercury’.

After ‘Pitfalls’

Herbert Butterfield went on to greater things: Master of Peterhouse, President of the Historical Association, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, Fellow of the British Academy, a knighthood. Christianity and History, above all, made him an international celebrity: in Brendan Simms’s words, ‘Butterfield became something of a sage among many Christian intellectuals, a prophet even.’⁵³ Intellectually, his interests moved on to historiography and international relations. Many projects remained unfulfilled: he never wrote his history of diplomacy or his biographies of Temperley and Charles James Fox. In person, the Sage of Peterhouse was very different from his public reputation. As ‘one who still remembers the famous Butterfield giggle’, Geoffrey Elton recalled Butterfield with affection before going on to demolish much of his reputation as a historian:

Maurice Cowling confirmed that ‘after shaving, his face was often like a battlefield’;⁵⁵ Ved Mehta, in his charming account of a lunch at the Master’s Lodge, recorded the Player’s cigarette that ‘hung from his lower lip, and threatened to fall off at any moment’.⁵⁶ John Cannon, who knew Butterfield as an undergraduate at Peterhouse, summed him up with characteristic brevity:

Under Butterfield, Peterhouse became famous as the centre of what Noel Annan denounced as ‘a kind of militant conservatism distinct from the Establishment conservatism of most Cambridge colleges. It was radical, reverent towards Christianity, irreverent towards liberals and scornful of socialists.’⁵⁸ It was also relentlessly negative. John Vincent recalled the other side of that famous giggle:

Such behaviour persisted long after Butterfield’s retirement in 1968. As a younger man an exceptionally considerate personal tutor,⁶⁰ as Master Butterfield could be remote and often intimidating with students. Ironically, perhaps, in view of his large and growing band of posthumous disciples, he established no ‘school’.⁶¹ But that was never his intention. ‘The point of teaching history to undergraduates’, he told Ved Mehta, ‘is to turn them into future public servants and statesmen.’⁶² Yet he continued to delight in subversion: in the words of Maurice Cowling’s obituary, ‘He rejected authority in historical thinking, attaching supreme importance to inventiveness, paradox, and interpretative deviance.’ And, Cowling continues, ‘He felt a deep and irrational regard for rakes whom he much preferred to the “virtuous and stiff-necked”.’⁶³ Desmond Williams was one of those rakes. The two men met and corresponded for the rest of Butterfield’s life. Williams wrote little but exerted his charm on generations of students at UCD. He was more successful than Butterfield in inspiring future scholars and more generous in fostering their future careers. He retired on grounds of ill health in 1983 and died in 1987, aged 66.

For a while, Butterfield continued to annoy the official historians. His name became a byword for carping criticism. In 1951 Woodward, by now a research professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, wrote to Margaret Lambert commiserating with her on the lack of support for modern documentary publishing on the part of the Royal Historical Society:

In 1953 Rohan Butler wrote:

They also responded publicly to Butterfield’s criticisms: implicitly in Woodward’s Raleigh Lecture to the British Academy in 1950; humorously in Hancock’s Webb Memorial Lecture of the same year; explicitly, as we have seen, in Medlicott’s inaugural lecture at LSE in 1955.⁶⁶

Butterfield’s official history file thins out after 1951 and I have discovered no further references to the subject in print. The clearest expression of what he was trying to say appears, typically, not in any published work but in a letter of May 1952 to a South African clergyman who had read History and Human Relations and was worried about the intention of the National Party government to use official history to legitimize the antecedents of the apartheid state.⁶⁷ In just over three closely typed pages, Butterfield set out his views with unprecedented concision, including what was perhaps his core belief: ‘I am sure that on a long-term view the ideal thing for historical study is a world of independent historians, choosing their own subjects for research, and allowed by the government free access to the archives.’⁶⁸ Then, after an interval of nearly thirty years, we find the letter I quoted near the beginning of this book, written to Desmond Williams a year before his death in 1979, in which he counselled historians to steer clear of government patronage. Butterfield continued:

By now the memory was hazy, but the conviction remained undimmed.

_____________

¹ Those who replied included G.R. Potter, J.E. Neale, T.S.R. Boase, Ernest Barker, Veronica Wedgwood, R.F. Treharne and J.R.M. Butler. He also received two letters from F.W. Crick of the Contemporary Review, to whom he had not sent an offprint.

² Taylor to Butterfield, 28 July 1949, BUTT/130/4. For details of the TLS affair, see the references on p. 4, note 21.

³ Studies, p. 132; Human Relations, p. 189. This was a view Butterfield had maintained for some time: see his ‘Tendencies in historical study in England’, Irish Historical Studies, iv (Mar. 1945), 209–23 (pp. 215–16).

⁴ Butterfield had the second letter transcribed, presumably by his faithful secretary Eve Bogle. I have transcribed the first: it runs to around 1600 words.

⁵ Butterfield told Medlicott that Woodward had earlier, in addition to these two letters, explained the situation ‘in long conversations that I had had with him’: letter of 5 August 1949, BUTT/130/4.

⁶ Woodward to Butterfield, 28 July 1949, BUTT/130/4. All further references in this and the following two paragraphs are to this letter.

⁷ Butterfield to Woodward, 31 July 1949, BUTT/130/4.

⁸ Woodward to Butterfield, 1 August 1949, BUTT/130/4.

⁹ See p. 47 below.

¹⁰ This was a point echoed by Medlicott when he wrote to the Times Literary Supplement in defence of Woodward and Butler against a further criticism by Taylor: letter to TLS, 30 April 1949, p. 281.

¹¹ I have found no reply to Woodward’s second letter in Butterfield’s papers.

¹² Medlicott to Butterfield, 3 August 1949, BUTT/130/4. The two volumes of Medlicott’s The Economic Blockade were published in 1952 and 1959.

¹³ Butterfield to Medlicott, 5 August 1949, BUTT/130/4.

¹⁴ Medlicott to Butterfield, 13 August 1949, BUTT/130/4.

¹⁵ This was a point echoed by Butterfield’s Cambridge colleague J.R.M. Butler, the editor-in-chief of the military series of the Cabinet Office’s official histories programme, in a letter of thanks for a copy of History and Human Relations (he called it Christianity and Human Relations, an understandable mistake): ‘… one can never hope to describe all the circumstances of the conception and growth of a policy: so much is likely to have been done in conversation or even by a look’: Butler to Butterfield, 12 August 1951, BUTT/130/4.

¹⁶ Butterfield to Connolly, 25 July 1949, and to Messrs Alex. Thom & Co. Ltd, 24 August 1949, BUTT/130/4.

¹⁷ Butterfield’s secretary (Eve Bogle) to Educational Co. of Ireland Ltd, 12 October 1949, BUTT/130/4.

¹⁸ Cambridge Journal, ii (Sept. 1949), 733–42.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 736.

²⁰ Undated record card with handwritten notes, BUTT/130/4.

²¹ Bentley, Butterfield, p. 251.

²² Studies, p. 130; Human Relations, p. 186.

²³ Arne Ordings dagbøker, vol. I, 19. juni 1942–23. juli 1945, ed. Erik Opsahl (Oslo, 2000), pp. 155–6 (entry for 27 February 1943): my translation. The words ‘secondrate’ and ‘background’ are given in English in the original.

²⁴ Quoted in Bentley, Butterfield, p. 42.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 59.

²⁷ ‘The dangers of history’, in History and Human Relations, pp. 158–81 (pp. 176–7).

²⁸ Quoted in Bentley, Butterfield, p. 63. But ‘he remained convinced that a piece of diplomatic history was as good a training as any for the young historian’: John Derry, ‘Herbert Butterfield’, in The Historian at Work, ed. John Cannon (London, 1980), p. 180. That Butterfield also acknowledged the limitations of diplomatic history is shown in Jeremy Black and Karl Schweizer, ‘The value of diplomatic history: A case study in the thought of Herbert Butterfield’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, xvii (2006), 617–31.

²⁹ Grahame Clark to Butterfield, 3 February 1945, enclosing a draft Air Ministry memorandum, BUTT/130/1. For the background to this proposal, see Frankland, History at War, p. 38.

³⁰ Handwritten notes, ‘Research degrees for work in government depts. etc.’, 11 February 1945, p. 2, BUTT/130/1.

³¹ Ibid., pp. 2, 4. If Butterfield’s objections had been accepted, they would have thwarted the ambitions of Noble Frankland, who was to become one of the most distinguished of all official historians (see pp. 46–7 below). Frankland was admitted to read for a DPhil at Oxford in January 1949 (Woodward was one of the faculty members who accepted his proposal); his thesis on the history of the strategic bombing offensive was awarded in April 1951: see Frankland, History at War, pp. 38, 57.

³² Studies, p. 130; Human Relations, p. 185.

³³ Studies, p. 130; Human Relations, p. 186.

³⁴ W.N. Medlicott, ‘The scope and study of international history’, International Affairs, xxxi (1955), 413–26 (p. 419).

³⁵ A similar example from domestic affairs, cited in the later version of the article and elsewhere, was that of a recently discovered letter from Charles James Fox showing that he was privately less keen on parliamentary reform in 1792 than he claimed to be in public: Human Relations, p. 208.

³⁶ Studies, p. 139; Human Relations, pp. 209–10; ‘The reconstruction of an historical episode: The history of the enquiry into the origins of the Seven Years War’, in Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1955), pp. 143–70.

³⁷ Studies, p. 136.

³⁸ Human Relations, p. 197.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 197.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. 202.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 203.

⁴² Ibid., pp. 204–5.

⁴³ Elements of the argument appear on pp. 138 and 139–41 of the Studies article.

⁴⁴ Human Relations, p. 210.

⁴⁵ Ibid., p. 215.

⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 212.

⁴⁷ Review of Charles Tansill, Back Door to War: Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy 1933–1941, Manchester Guardian, 24 October 1952, reprinted as ‘Roosevelt and the war’, in Struggles for Supremacy, ed. Wrigley, pp. 245–7.

⁴⁸ Human Relations, p. 217.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 214.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 223.

⁵¹ Bentley, Butterfield, p. 202.

⁵² Human Relations, pp. 210–11.

⁵³ Brendan Simms, ‘Butterfield, Sir Herbert (1900–1979)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30888>.

⁵⁴ G.R. Elton, ‘Herbert Butterfield and the study of history’, Historical Journal, xxvii (1984), 729–43 (p. 729).

⁵⁵ Maurice Cowling, ‘Herbert Butterfield, 1900–1979’, Proceedings of the British Academy, lxv (1979), 595–609 (p. 607).

⁵⁶ Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (London, 1961), p. 195.

⁵⁷ ‘Butterfield, Herbert’, in The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians, ed. John Cannon et al. (Oxford, 1988), p. 61.

⁵⁸ Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 270.

⁵⁹ Quoted in Bentley, Butterfield, p. 285.

⁶⁰ John Cloake, ‘The scholar cadet: More recollections of Peterhouse in the 1940s’, Peterhouse Annual Record 2003/2004, pp. 13–25.

⁶¹ Unless, of course, one counts the ‘Peterhouse school of historians’ that caused Hugh Trevor-Roper so much distress after he became Master of the College (as Lord Dacre) in 1980: see One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper, ed. Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman (Oxford, 2014), p. 254 (where Dacre holds Butterfield largely to blame) and especially pp. 273–6.

⁶² Mehta, Fly and the Flybottle, p. 196.

⁶³ Cowling, ‘Herbert Butterfield’, p. 608.

⁶⁴ Woodward to Lambert, 26/27 September 1951, Lambert papers.

⁶⁵ ‘Additional notes for a talk on F.O. Library and publications’ (by Woodward), 6 January 1953, FCO Historians’ collection.

⁶⁶ E.L. Woodward, ‘Some considerations on the present state of historical studies’ (read 17 May 1950), Proceedings of the British Academy 1950, pp. 95–112; Hancock quoted in Harris, ‘Thucydides amongst the mandarins’, p. 135; Medlicott, ‘International history’, p. 419.

⁶⁷ Rev. A.W. Blaxall to Butterfield, 6 April 1952, BUTT/130/4.

⁶⁸ Butterfield to Blaxall, 9 May 1952, BUTT/130/4. The correspondence with Rev. Blaxall is reproduced in full as an appendix to this book (see Appendix I).

⁶⁹ Butterfield to Williams, 3 May 1978 (unsigned draft), BUTT/531/W/385. See the comment on p. 4, note 14.