The Second Sir Herbert Butterfield Memorial Lecture, delivered at Queen's University, Belfast, on 13 February 1986.

¹ ‘Herbert Butterfield and the study of history’, Historical Journal xxvii (1984), 729–43Google Scholar . The lecture was delivered at Queen's University, Belfast, on 29 April 1983.

² Himmelfarb, G., Lord Acton, London 1952Google Scholar ; Altholtz, J. L., The Liberal Catholic Movement in England, London 1962Google Scholar ; MacDougall, H. A., The Acton-Newman Relations, New York 1962Google Scholar ; Butterfield, H.. Lord Acton, London 1948Google Scholar ; Mathew, David, Lord Acton and his Times, London 1968Google Scholar ; Schuettinger, R., Lord Acton, Historian of Liberty, La Salle 1976Google Scholar ; Izquierdo, F. Gonzalo, La Libertad politico en el liberalismo del siglo xix, Santiago de Chile 1979, 71ff.Google Scholar , is only a brief presentation of the essentials.

³ Victor Conzemius showed how all the most important information in the Letters of Quirinus, English trans. Oxenham, H. N., London 1870Google Scholar , came from Acton's pen. There were other contributors, but Acton provided all the information that mattered. The letters were put together by Dollinger for the Allgemeine Z'itung, and this editing of the letters with other passages from Friedrich and Arco, and extracts from information in newspapers, enabled Acton to deny that he was Quirinus. Conzemius’ proof shows that this denial was only just to be reconciled with morality; cf. Festschrift Hans Foerster, Fribourg 1964, 229–56Google Scholar ; and ‘Die romischen Briefe vom Konzil; eine entstehungsgeschichtliche und quellenkritische Untersuchung zum Konzilsjournalismus Ignaz von Dollingers und Lord Actons’, Romische Quartalschriftl ix (1964), 186–229Google Scholar ; lx (1965), 76-119. The enquiries of Conzemius put quite out of date the earlier enquiry of Roloff, E. A. in Zeitschrift fur Kirchengeschichte xxxv (1914), 204–54Google Scholar.

⁴ For Prothero, see the lecture by his relative Crawley, C. W., Sir George Prothero and his Circle, London 1970Google Scholar , repr. from the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. xx (1970)Google Scholar . For Sir John Laughton, see Gooch, G. P., ‘Victorian Memories vii’, Contemporary Review clxxxix (1956), 205Google Scholar . Laughton would have been a respectable, though narrow, appointment. He was a naval historian who had specialised in Nelson (arranging Nelson's Letters and Dispatches, 1886; publishing biographical studies in naval history; and, in 1894, showing wider range by editing the State Papers relating to the defeat of the Spanish Armada). After he was not considered for the Regius chair he continued to do good work. In 1895, he had far more to his credit than Acton by way of publication. But he was mainly an editor and popular writer; and his range could be seen to be much more limited than the extraordinary range of Acton.

⁵ Cf. Maitland, F. W., in Cambridge Review, 10 Oct. 1902, 8.Google Scholar

⁶ Daily Mews, 8 July 1902 ; , Maitland, op. cit. 9Google Scholar . Maitland's article was reprinted in The Cambridge Mind; ninety years of the Cambridge Review, ed. Homberger, E. et al., London 1970Google Scholar.

⁷ Bell, Alan, in Times Literary Supplement, 8 02 1974, 137.Google Scholar

⁸ Spectator xv (1895), 814.Google Scholar

⁹ Saturday Review, 22 06 1895, 821–2Google Scholar . Cf. A thenaeum cvii (1896), 85Google Scholar , 18 Jan.: ‘We have read and re-read Lord Acton's Inaugural…with the greatest care, but though each perusal raises our respect for his enormous learning, his grave and dignified style, his high-minded sense of his responsibilities, and the sententious wisdom of many of his sayings, we feel largely in the dark as to the general drift and tendency of his remarks…But whatever our admiration of his lecture, we can only express astonishment at the extraordinary apparatus of his notes…In this little book all spontaneity seems crushed out by misdirected learning.’ Nation lxii (1896), 39Google Scholar , 9 Jan.: ‘one of the most interesting figures in English society…’ whose attitude to Catholicism is ‘a curious psychological enigma'. The lecture produced in many quarters an impression ‘of mystification and bewilderment’. ‘At first reading- and few will give it more than a first reading— there seems no clear pronouncement on anything.’ ‘Lord Acton is not, so far as we are aware, an original investigator; he is contented to read and ponder with all the shrewdness of a man of affairs and of the world, over the historical works of others; and he is as far removed as possible from the popular lecturer or entertaining essayist. But there is certainly need of men of his type, and if he does not exactly stimulate Cambridge undergraduates either to begin to read or to begin to make research, he will probably, to those who have already made some way with reading and research, be a wise counsellor and helpful critic’. The American Historical Review i (1896), 517Google Scholar , professed itself stimulated by the eloquent ideals and depressed because they are so high that no one could ever practise them. The lecturer ‘appears to set small store by impartiality’ (!). ‘The historian, who conceives it his duty to investigate and present his facts with a view to a moral suited to his own time and his own opinions or prejudices, will be tolerably sure to distort the past, while the moral sought for today may perhaps be something wholly different tomorrow.’ This is the more piquant since the reviewer was the historian of the Inquisition, H. C. Lea, who was no doubt affected by Acton's brilliant review of his book in the EHR. In one of Creighton's letters to Acton, Creighton expressed his admiration for Acton's notice of Lea in this rare language, which shows how the loftiness of the Inaugural was growing upon the readers of Acton before the Inaugural was ever delivered: ‘You set before us all the loftiest standards; you call upon us to be greater than we feel we can be’, cf. letters of 20 June 1888, when Creighton asked Acton if he would like to review Lea, and of 18 July 1888, sending the book for review. In the Nineteenth Century xxx (1895), 619–33Google Scholar , W. S. Lilley regarded the Inaugural as ‘among the most important events that have for a long time occurred in English academical life’. But this was not so much, perhaps, because of the ideas which the lecture contained, as because a Roman Catholic was lecturing as a professor at a university from which he had been excluded as an undergraduate because of his religion. He professed total agreement with all Acton's doctrine — scientific spirit, total impartiality except in normal judgement, liberty as the essence of progress.

¹⁰ Professor Thomas Macintyre of Toronto, our leading authority on the Butterfield Papers, tells me that, in 1919, the Peterhouse Historical Society, where the young Butterfield was active, debated Acton's Inaugural and defined it (charmingly) as ‘the Breviary of all historians’.

¹¹ MacDougall, H. A., The Acton-Newman Relations, 184–5.Google Scholar

¹² Acton, Lord, The History of Freedom and other Essays, London 1907, 22–3.Google Scholar

¹³ For Seeley, see now Wormell, Deborah, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History, Cambridge 1980.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, ed. Paul, Herbert, 2nd edn, London 1913.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Butterfield, H. and Watkin, Aelred, ‘Gasquet and the Acton-Simpson Correspondence’, Cambridge Historical Journal x (1954), 75–105.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Conzemius, V., Dollinger Briefwechsel, 3 vols (Kömmission fur bayerische Landesgeschichte bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften), 1963-1971Google Scholar . For all the history of the letters, see preface to vol. i.

¹⁷ Fr. McElrath, D., Lord Acton: the decisive decade 1864-74: essays and documents, Louvain 1970.Google Scholar

¹⁸ They were worked through by the German, Ulrich Noack, in the later 1920s on a visit to Cambridge. He used the cards for his three volumes which are still useful. Geschichtswissenschaft und Weisheit, Frankfurt 1935Google Scholar ; Katholizität und Geistesfreiheit, Frankfurt 1936Google Scholar ; and Politik als Sicherung der Freiheit, Frankfurt 1947Google Scholar ; cf. also the Festschrift to Noack, Ein Leben aus freier Mitte; Beiträge zur Geschichtsforschung, Gottingen 1961Google Scholar . The American Gertrude Himmelfarb also used them.

¹⁹ Cambridge, University Library, Acton Papers, Box 19.

²⁰ Kraus, Franz Xaver, Tagebiicher, ed. Schiel, Hubert, Cologne 1957, 371Google Scholar . Cf. also Schiel, H., Franz Xaver Kraus und die katholische Tiibinger Schule, Ellwangen 1958Google Scholar ; and the same author in Neut Deutsche Biographic xii (1979), 684Google Scholar , and literature. Kraus was really the founder of Christian archaeology in Germany and died the year before Acton.

²¹ It must be said, however, that Butterfield was not at all an admirer of Paolo Sarpi. He once referred to him, rather surprisingly, as a ‘sinister man in the shadows’: Christianity and History, London 1948, 20Google Scholar . He was commenting on the conspiracy theory of history, or the backstairs theory of history, which certainly attracted a piece, though not a very important piece of Acton's mind; which arose from his excitement that he was a contemporary of the opening of the European State archives.

²² Butterfield, H., Man on his Past, Cambridge 1955, 93–4Google Scholar . For Acton's refusal to make the historian a hanging judge see Nineteenth Century xxxiii (1893), 883–6Google Scholar , on Tocqueville as joining 'the disparaging choir, that declares the reign of sin and of folly, and contributes to the Iconoclasm of History.

²³ Cited , Butterfield, op. cit. 96.Google Scholar

²⁴ Cf. The History of Freedom, 219-21.

²⁵ Cf. Historical Essays and Studies, ed. Figgis, J. N. and Laurence, R. V., London 1907, 506Google Scholar ; , Noack, Geschichtswissenschaft, 151Google Scholar.

²⁶ , Figgis-Laurence, Correspondence, 309–10.Google Scholar

²⁷ Butterfield, H., History and Human Relations, London 1951.Google Scholar

²⁸ Gilbert, M., The Holocaust: the history of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War, London 1985.Google Scholar

²⁹ , Butterfield, op. cit. 103.Google Scholar

³⁰ , Butterfield, Acton, 8Google Scholar ; cf. Kochan, L, Acton on History, London 1954, 69Google Scholar . In Christianity and History, Butterfield asks the extraordinary question — with the intention of showing how extraordinary it is — ‘Was Napoleon better than Hitler?’ ‘You had better leave it to the judgment day, for it is past man's unravelling.’ Butterfield could imagine himself, placed in other circumstances, conducting Stalin's Cold War, or being a member of the murderous Stern gang, ‘secure in the conviction that my angers were based on righteous indignation. The historian cannot say whether Napoleon or Hitler made the most of the opportunities heaven gave to each of them. He cannot decide which of these men is better or worse in the eyes of eternity. What history does is to uncover man's universal sin.’ ‘The final effect of the reading of history upon me’ is ‘the thesis “There but for the grace of God go I”’. It has to be said that this moving and devout thesis is less convincing if you knew the man. If Butterfield had conducted the Cold War it would not have been very frigid; and if he had been a member of the Stern Gang he would have been far more likely to be murdered by his murderous colleagues.

Cf. also ibid. 91-2. ‘We are right if we want to see our history in moral terms, but we are not permitted to erect the human drama into a great conflict between good and evil in this particular way. If there is a fundamental fight between good and evil in history, therefore, as I think there is, we must regard it as being waged not directly between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century, or between Germans and Russians in the twentieth, but in a deeper realm for the most part out of reach of the technical historian. In reality the essential strategies of the war of good against evil are conducted within the intimate interior of personalities…In the last resort he [the historian] sees human history as a pilgrimage of all mankind…just as Christianity tries to bind it [the human race] together in love, so the role of the technical historian is that of a reconciling mind that seeks to comprehend. Taking things retrospectively and recollecting in tranquillity, the historian works over the past to cover the conflicts with understanding, and explains the unlikenesses between men and makes us sensible of their terrible predicaments; until at the finish — when all is as remote as the tale of Troy — we are all at last perhaps to be a little sorry for everybody.’ This is a deeply religious view of historical enquiry. But the observer may still think that Acton's question about morality was of the first importance and long for the writer who tells us that a blackguard was a blackguard and not to be excused for mass murder because his father ran away from his mother.

The problem does not go away. Sybel bitterly attacked Ranke for writing history without moral indignation (cf. , Butterfield, Man on his Past, 95)Google Scholar . Acton assailed Creighton for writing history without moral indignation in his attitude to Renaissance popes, and yet something about the criticism is a genuine criticism of a certain pallidness in Creigh ton's History at certain moments which were not historically pallid.

³¹ Ibid. 106.

³² Ibid. 108.

³³ Ibid. no, 112.

³⁴ Blennerhassett, Charlotte, Edinburgh Review (1903), 532–3.Google Scholar

³⁵ Cf. , Butterfield, Lord Acton, 23Google Scholar : ‘The giant who could be so charming, so assuredly pontifical, is in reality a wounded hero, a hurt lion, with painful inner scars.’