The outsider who came in from the cold

Professor McIntire disowns any claim to have written a conventional biography of the Cam- bridge historian Herbert Butter- field. His book is a detailed, scholarly study of the intellectual odyssey of a complex character, who wrestled all his life with the problems of writing history. As such it is not an easy read.a

His biographer presents his subject as a classic case of enduring parental influence. He ‘idolised’ his father. A textile worker, married to a domestic servant, the father was a deeply religious Wesleyan Methodist, forced by poverty to leave school at eight. The son, born in 1900, fulfilled his father’s hopes by becoming a Methodist lay preacher. Having an intense Protestant concern with his own spiritual life, it was natural that he should stress ‘the all- surpassing influence of human personality in history’. This was more than Carlyle’s dictum that history was the sum of ‘innumerable biographies’; it committed him to a Berlinesque defence of free will against determinism.

McIntire sees Butterfield as a residual legatee of the dissenting tradition of Wesleyan Methodism. But his father was far from the radical political dissenters like Cobden and Bright, praised by A. J. P. Taylor. The prospect of revolution horrified him: the ‘barbarian’ working class would be ‘civilised’ by imbibing the manners — he was a stickler for ‘respectable’ clothing — and ethos of their social superiors. As a Cambridge undergraduate Butterfield could write, ‘The whole cloak of respectable life is cumbersome to me.’ Yet he was an early example of the success of the ambitious scholarship boy from a humble home. Through slogging at his books he was to become Master of his college, Peterhouse, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and Regius Professor of History. The outsider who retained his Yorkshire accent became an insider, ending up with a knighthood when knighthoods were still a prize worth getting.