Michael Bentley has written a fascinating study of Herbert Butterfield, with the somewhat sensational subtitle, "History, Science and God". It's the story of an ambitious and talented historian, who wrote the well-known Whig Interpretation of History, but never produced the magnum opus everyone had been waiting for. This failing we might call the "Herbert Butterfield Problem": something similar applies to both Isaiah Berlin and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Yet he had a remarkable impact in diplomatic history, history of science, 18th-century British history and concepts in international relations as well as the problems of historiography. He had a gadfly mind, a strongly contrarian streak and a mischievous sense of humour.
Butterfield began his university days at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1918, having been to Keighly grammar school in Yorkshire. He excelled as an undergraduate, winning prize after prize, and in the manner of the time received a fellowship before meeting any serious test of creative ability. An elegant and authoritative account of the peace tactics of Napoleon, based on sources in various languages, soon appeared, followed by the popular, yet strangely outdated, polemic against the Whig interpretation. Butterfield was then wafted up the academic ladder at a time when others had left for service in the second world war.
Thereafter he faced two problems that refused to go away: how was he to meet the high expectations that would justify early promotion and compensate not only for the absence of war service, unexplained by Bentley, but for his open association with Nazi sympathisers in Ireland during the conflict? Those returning in uniform to Cambridge such as Colonel Annan at King's, a figure of significant influence but little intellectual substance were not forgiving.
The second problem was something he believed in, and this is where God makes an appearance. He was firmly convinced (and in this he was unlike Berlin or Trevor-Roper) that man was given to original sin. This went deep. Even when mired in administrative trivia as a successful master of Peterhouse and no less effective vice-chancellor of Cambridge in 1960, he nonetheless found sufficient time to make extensive notes in German on Alois Wachtel's Beiträge zur Geschichtstheologie des Aurelius Augustinus: not exactly light reading even for a devotee of St Augustine.
In private, Butterfield's convictions about original sin somehow enabled him as a married man to rationalise an extended affair. In public, it enabled him to diminish Nazi Germany's significance on the grounds that, in the city of man, as opposed to the city of God, bad behaviour is only to be expected. "Hitlerism will be alright when it has won," he told his protégé Brian Wormald. He even gave a lecture tour of Germany after Kristallnacht. Somehow degrees of badness got lost in his Manichean vision. This state of mind never properly resolved itself. A precocious German Jew who arrived with the Kindertransport found work in the Peterhouse garden (the late John Grenville); Butterfield, as tutor, interceded to get him permission to use the college library and encouraged him to try for university, but on the condition that it was not Cambridge.
His initial misjudgment was exacerbated by doctrinal overreaction against former regius professor Lord Acton's belief that moral judgments in history mattered. The moral relativism that would have served him well in analysing international relations in any other century proved disastrous in his own. Hitler was not just another Napoleon, despite what AJP Taylor professed to believe; he turned out to be bent on genocide as well as war. Butterfield was, of course, not the only intellectual to get this wrong and not the only historian to be hopelessly misled by relying too much on the past to make sense of the present. Others, however, such as Arthur Bryant, alleviated their difficulties by making strenuously patriotic efforts to rehabilitate themselves; I suppose Butterfield could at least be admired for sticking to his position.
Jonathan Haslam's Russia's Cold War is published by Yale.
