[3] In the British context, whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress.
[10] Butterfield's usage of the term was not in relation to the British or American Whig parties or Whiggism, but rather took aim at "the nineteenth-century school of historiography that praised all progress and habitually associated Protestantism with liberal views of liberty".
[16] He also criticised it for modernising the past: "the result [of whig history] is that to many of us [historical figures] seem much more modern than they really were, and even when we have corrected this impression by closer study we find it difficult to keep in mind the differences between their world and ours".
[17] Whig history is also criticised as having an overly dualist view with heroes on the side of liberty and freedom against traditionalist villains opposing the inevitability of progress.
[22] Butterfield instead advances a view of history stressing the accidental and contingent nature of events rather than some kind of inevitable and structural shift.
[25] Butterfield's formulation has subsequently received much attention and the kind of historical writing he argued against in generalized terms is no longer academically respectable.
Despite its polemical success, Butterfield's celebrated book was criticized by David Cannadine as "slight, confused, repetitive and superficial".
[26] However, of the English tradition more broadly, Cannadine wrote: It was fiercely partisan and righteously judgemental, dividing the personnel of the past into the good and the bad.
And it did so on the basis of the marked preference for liberal and progressive causes, rather than conservative and reactionary ones ... Whig history was, in short, an extremely biased view of the past: eager to hand out moral judgements, and distorted by teleology, anachronism and present-mindedness.[27]E.
[28] Michael Bentley analyses Butterfield's whig theory as referring to a canon of 19th-century historians in and of England (such as William Stubbs, James Anthony Froude, E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green, W. E. H. Lecky, Lord Acton, J. R. Seeley, S. R. Gardiner, C. H. Firth and J.
If they could not have found the grandeur that they developed had they been writing half a century earlier, neither could they have supported their optimism had they lived to endure the barbarisms of the Somme and Passchendaele.
[4] It described a "continuity of institutions and practices since Anglo-Saxon times that lent to English history a special pedigree, one that instilled a distinctive temper in the English nation (as whigs liked to call it) and an approach to the world [which] issued in law and lent legal precedent a role in preserving or extending the freedoms of Englishmen".
These historians were members of the New Whigs around Charles James Fox (1749–1806) and Lord Holland (1773–1840) in opposition until 1830 and so "needed a new historical philosophy".
Hume still dominated English historiography, but this changed when Thomas Babington Macaulay entered the field, utilising Fox and Mackintosh's work and manuscript collections.
According to Reba Soffer, Stubbs was a true believer who concealed his biases, even from himself, behind the façade of a dispassionate historian translating original documents into magisterial prose.
[42]Stubb's history began with an imagined Anglo-Saxon past into which representative parliamentary institutions emerged and fought for control with the absolutist crown in various stages (including overreaches in during the English Civil War) before uniting in "nation, church, peers and people" in the Glorious Revolution.
[44] Albert Pollard, writing in 1920, also shot through much of Stubbs' ideas on the representative and law-making powers of early English parliaments, pulling the emergence of a semi-independent House of Commons to the 1620s.
In 1898, Quick explained the value of studying the history of educational reform, arguing that the great accomplishments of the past were cumulative and comprised the building blocks that “would raise us to a higher standing-point from which we may see much that will make the right road clearer to us”.
[48] Marwick also positively mentions Gardiner, Seeley, Lord Acton, and T. F. Tout as transforming the teaching and study of history at British universities into a recognisable modern form.
[49] The First World War, however, did substantial damage to whig history's fundamental assumption of progress and improvement: Accelerated by the sceptical power of a new breed of historian epitomized in the brilliance of F. W. Maitland, whiggery had begun its turn downwards (we are told) and met its Waterloo on the Somme[50] ... [T]win thrusts—on the one hand cultural despair in face of a dead civilization, on the other a determination to make history say something different for the post-war generation—worked between them to put whig susceptibilities between a rock and a hard place.
For, as P. B. M. Blaas has shown, those earlier attacks were part and parcel of a more general onslaught in the name of an autonomous, professional and scientific history, on popular, partisan and moralising historiography.
[62] Burrow views Marxist history, with its "[supposed] anticipated terminus from which it derives its moral and political point", as "characteristically whig".
"[65] Regarding Canada, Allan Greer argues: The interpretive schemes that dominated Canadian historical writing through the middle decades of the twentieth century were built on the assumption that history had a discernible direction and flow.