On Thursday 13 June 1895, a meeting took place in the Senate House to discuss a suitable, tangible, and long-lasting memorial for Sir John Robert Seeley, who had died in Cambridge on 13 January, aged sixty, having suffered ill health for some time. The name Seeley is familiar to all Cambridge historians since the library in the faculty building recognizes the ninth incumbent of the chair founded three hundred years ago.Footnote ¹ An account of the 1895 meeting appeared in the Cambridge University Reporter in October and it reveals an elaborate display of opinions and feelings concerning a man who was, after all, a public figure and a controversial one at that.Footnote ² In using the notion of ‘display’ I mean to draw attention to the formality and careful choreography of such an occasion, as well as to any specifically visual-cum-material form a memorial would take. The ceremonial setting shaped how Seeley was invoked, his legacy and publications discussed. Among his publications, The expansion of England, 1883, was repeatedly mentioned.Footnote ³ It has received much attention in recent years, especially in relation to the idea of a ‘Greater Britain’.Footnote ⁴

Sir John was well known long before Expansion appeared, especially for Ecce homo: a survey of the life and work of Jesus Christ, published to considerable controversy in 1865. The book appeared anonymously, but it soon became an open secret who the author was.Footnote ⁵ Seeley, knighted by Lord Rosebery soon after he took office as prime minister in March 1894, was a man of wide interests, evidenced by his striking range of publications. Interest in him has never abated; many authors have engaged with him and his legacy and not just to suggest, as some have claimed, that he was the first ‘proper’ historian to occupy the chair.Footnote ⁶

The history of the regius chair of modern history, as it was called until 2010, is considerably more complex than that claim implies.Footnote ⁷ Since reading lists and lecture notes survive from before 1869, when Seeley was appointed to succeed the Reverend Charles Kingsley, surely the most famous incumbent, we can get a sense of what history at Cambridge consisted of.Footnote ⁸ Seeley himself can help since he contributed to and seems to have been the organizer behind The student’s guide to the University of Cambridge.Footnote ⁹ A strikingly comprehensive volume, it provides estimates of the costs students would incur, types of accommodation available, the nature of examinations, and lists of reading for subjects, such as moral sciences, law, and theology as well as mathematics and classics, and in every one except medicine, historical works are listed. Using the 2nd edition, I note that there was a paper on the history and philosophy of science, that mathematicians read Newton’s Principia, classicists studied numerous historical works, by Arnold and Mommsen, for instance, the history of political thought loomed large, and Hallam’s Constitutional history was frequently mentioned.Footnote ¹⁰ Before the advent of the Historical Tripos, then, there was apparently widespread interest in history as a subject and in sources from the past.Footnote ¹¹ That it is possible to delve deeper into the history of the regius chair is thanks in no small measure to assiduous clerks and administrators. The record of the meeting in June 1895, likely compiled by John Neville Keynes, secretary to the Council of the Senate from 1892 and later registrary, has been pasted into a guard book in the University’s archives. An intriguing artefact in its own right, it was probably assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a few later items added.Footnote ¹² It is not a systematic record, but a heterogeneous assemblage of manuscript and printed materials that go back to 1629, nearly a century before the regius chair was formally instituted during the reign of George I.Footnote ¹³

The first document is an 1872 copy of a 1629 codicil to Lord Brooke’s will in which he leaves money ‘for the maintenance of a publique History Lecturer within the said University of Cambridge for ever’, nominating Doctor Isaac Dorislaus as the first incumbent. The document demonstrates that a desire to provide history lectures existed long before 1724. In fact, Lord Brooke was not the only person who wished to institute a history post at Cambridge, since item 3 in the guard book is an undated proposal to found a Professorship of British Church History and the Anglo-Saxon Language by the antiquarian Sir Henry Spelman, who died in 1641.Footnote ¹⁴ Such papers alert us to another, rather different point concerning the role of the registrary – an elected post.Footnote ¹⁵ The 1872 copy was signed H. R. Luard. Dr Henry Richards Luard, a medieval historian at Trinity, was registrary between 1862 and 1891, in succession to Joseph Romilly, whose wonderfully evocative diaries mention three of the regius chairs – William Smyth, James Stephen, and Charles Kingsley, the sixth, seventh and eighth incumbents.Footnote ¹⁶ In contributing to and selecting papers for the guard book, Luard acted as a historian of the chair, along with others, possibly clerks, but also plausibly fellow registraries, who worked with remarkably small teams until well into the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁷ Papers were copied from originals in the Public Record Office, letters to the vice-chancellor retrieved, items cut out of the Reporter as were articles in newspapers that related to the chair and these sit alongside communications from the government about the post, sent directly to the registrary, who was responsible, among other things, for giving the professors their share of the fees paid by those attending lectures. Romilly, registrary between 1832 and his retirement in 1861, himself attended lectures given by William Smyth, and, given the tiny size of what we might anachronistically call the central administration of the university, and the short tenure of vice-chancellors at that time, the registrary was a key figure, often, like Keynes, a person of intellectual distinction in his own right.Footnote ¹⁸ The registrary was closely involved with all the university’s doings – a major player as well as an invaluable witness. Furthermore, registraries handled the money, which came from government, to pay incumbents’ salaries.Footnote ¹⁹ Bearing these points in mind, I return to the June 1895 meeting and to John Robert Seeley, classicist, poet, literary critic, biographer of Stein and Napoleon, son of a London publisher and bookseller, Robert Benton Seeley, himself a published author on religious matters.

The proceedings of the meeting were recorded in some detail, but it was not the first to be convened to commemorate a regius professor of modern history, nor was Seeley the first public figure to hold the position, since a bust of William Smyth was commissioned in the late 1840s,Footnote ²⁰ and both James Stephen and Charles Kingsley were well known to the public at the time of their appointments in 1849 and 1860 respectively. Nonetheless, the 1895 meeting is noteworthy by virtue of the attempt to embed Seeley’s memory in the doings of what was then usually referred to as the School of History and in the University more broadly. Attention was paid, for example, to the library, which began with a bequest from John Symonds, augmented by William Smyth’s collection, also bequeathed, and to a medal to be awarded in Seeley’s name.Footnote ²¹ (Figure 1) Since the guard book contains a number of letters bickering about the process of determining winners, its administration was clearly a live issue at the end of the 1890s.Footnote ²²

Figure 1. Seeley medal. Courtesy of the History Faculty, University of Cambridge. Photography by Lloyd Mann.

Participants in the Senate House meeting engaged in forms of portrayal; speakers sought both to evoke the late professor and to recount their association with him in vivid terms. The occasion created and brought into being an imagined community by, for example, noting those who could not be present, but wished to be associated with it, including Rosebery, Arthur Balfour, and Gladstone, by linking Seeley as an interpreter of the past with Tennyson, Wordsworth, and Milton, poets ‘closely connected with Cambridge’,Footnote ²³ who were likewise interpreters, and by inviting the audience to distance themselves from critics of Seeley, such as the Lords Beaconsfield and Shaftesbury, while participating in the celebration of ‘so unique a personality’, as the vice-chancellor put it.Footnote ²⁴ The twenty-two incumbents so far form another imagined community, a lineage rooted in an ever-changing institution, which exhibited a strong sense of its own history, even as the incumbents were notably diverse.Footnote ²⁵ There is no simple pattern to be discerned in the sequence as implied by notions such as professionalization. The fragile coherence of this succession is shored up by a number of forceful figures, whose significance as historians is widely attested, even if few are uncontroversial. Seeley is such a figure, whose eminence rests on memory and carefully cultivated posthumous reputation as well as on his actual life and publications. The 1895 meeting is a valuable record of some of the processes through which the constructions ‘Seeley’ and ‘Cambridge history’ came into being.

The speeches necessarily contained broad assumptions and claims about the nature of history. In articulating Seeley’s importance, speakers were not just laying out a kind of manifesto, they were in effect working through some intricate issues concerning the practice of history. Many of the interventions mentioned Seeley specifically as thinker and writer: the advantage of being a professor, the marquis of Lorne claimed, was having time to think, at least compared to those on the front line of politics. According to another participant:

At the same time as Seeley ‘was a great man of letters’,Footnote ²⁷ his commitment to ‘political education’ and ‘the development of research’ was also praised.Footnote ²⁸ Speakers were clear that Seeley was not ‘a mere cataloguer of records’,Footnote ²⁹ that he was not interested in burdening minds with facts.Footnote ³⁰

In stressing the importance of a historical library, the bishop of Peterborough asserted that it would be as vital to students of history as a laboratory was to those learning chemistry.Footnote ³¹ The idea of historical study as a ‘school of statesmanship’, a phrase that featured in Seeley’s inaugural and remains strongly associated with him, was certainly mentioned, while it was asserted that he was not a doubter in matters of religion.Footnote ³² This was possibly prudence to forestall criticism, but it serves to remind us of the intense controversies around Seeley’s religious publications, and of the tangles that ensnared James Stephen over his Essays in ecclesiastical biography, first published in 1849, the year he took up the chair.Footnote ³³ The speeches in 1895 thus reveal some careful negotiations over what it meant to be a historian, their duties and responsibilities. We might deem the meeting a moment of articulation, when participants sought to portray Seeley in such a way as to secure his reputation and that of historical studies at Cambridge. In addition to claims about his literary merits and status as a thinker alongside plans for lasting legacies, such as the library, a portrait, and the medal, several speakers stressed that he was a ‘remarkable teacher’, and most were happy to affirm the political relevance of Seeley’s work on empire, while ensuring that his views on the matter were clearly stated.Footnote ³⁴

There was evidently concern that Seeley’s views on empire were not misunderstood, not seen, as the master of Trinity put it, as jingoistic. The marquis of Lorne, who had been governor general of Canada, summed up Seeley’s thesis by insisting that ‘you must in the case of these great self-governing communities look upon them as in alliance with us rather than as part and parcel of our body politic at home’.Footnote ³⁵ Seeley grappled with large issues of international significance, including foreign policy in general and over many centuries. This was the subject of his posthumous publication, The growth of British policy, and, like his work on Stein and Napoleon, it indicates Seeley’s internationalism.Footnote ³⁶ The study of living languages was an integral part of the original endowment, since the professor was responsible for employing modern language teachers to benefit students going into public service, thereby yoking together the study of history and contemporary life. Indeed in an introductory lecture, dated 1809 and published in 1840, William Smyth referred to ‘the professorship of modern history and languages’.Footnote ³⁷

The last book to appear in Seeley’s lifetime was on Goethe, published in 1894 by Seeley and Company, and designed to make ‘a great and delightful poet’ more accessible to English-speaking audiences.Footnote ³⁸ Goethe reviewed after sixty years elaborated essays published a decade earlier in the Contemporary Review; it indicates the breadth and depth of Seeley’s literary interests, which included Milton.Footnote ³⁹ He was not just concerned with Goethe the poet, but discussed the whole range of his output including the novels, the two parts of Faust, his colour theory, Dichtung und Warheit, and so on. At many points, Seeley addresses the theme of unity: ‘if the variety of his work is remarkable, their unity is more remarkable still’; ‘His wisdom…had unity about it’; ‘when we look at his teaching as a whole, we find that it has unity’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Seeley was no Goethe, as he knew full well, but it is possible to sense a profound admiration for ‘the man who took almost as much interest in science as in poetry’, ‘who had a love of natural science’.Footnote ⁴¹ At one point, he compares Goethe with Bacon: ‘both had a prophetic sense of the tendency of science, a profound and just instinct of new scientific developments at hand’.Footnote ⁴² Seeley sought, then, to give a fully rounded sense of Goethe, to offer his readers a sensitive portrayal. Holistic aspirations are articulated at many points in the book; they remain just as relevant to understanding the practice of history and historians as they were to Seeley’s appreciation of Goethe’s oeuvre.Footnote ⁴³

It may be tempting to assign Seeley’s publications to different categories, such as ‘religious’, ‘historical’, ‘literary history’, and ‘pedagogical’, and to stress his own distinction between serious writings and more popular ones.Footnote ⁴⁴ This encourages a focus on his supposedly more properly historical output, thereby supporting familiar ideas about changes in the discipline over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is reasonable to assume that Seeley, like his fellow regius professors, took contexts of publication into account when writing, and adjusted claims and style accordingly as his career evolved. In his life and mind, however, matters were perhaps more fluid – a point for commentators to consider. Historians have adopted a range of emphases in relation to Seeley, with many embracing accounts that deploy a model of professionalization and specialization in the development of history as an academic field.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, it is worth being sceptical about the teleology such an approach implies. There have been incumbents of the chair in the twentieth century who do not fit neatly into these familiar narratives, which arguably become more relevant in the period after the Second World War, although even then David Knowles does not fit this pattern.Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, there is no inherent tension between specialization and engaging with non-academic audiences; nonetheless, since the latter is time consuming, one might expect super-professionals to distance themselves from ‘popularization’. Yet most of the regius professors have addressed diverse audiences over their careers, with J. B. Bury contributing to the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example.Footnote ⁴⁷ That very diversity suggests one way in which it is possible to assess their public profiles; others include forms of public service undertaken and the range of media in which they have been represented and which they deployed.

One strand of my arguments concerns the labile relationships between history and other fields, such as languages, literature, theology, and politics, in Cambridge in particular as well as more generally. Another is about intellectual breadth, clearly present in the case of Seeley, and of several other incumbents, including J. B. Bury, whom I take to be a central figure in any historical account of the chair. While he is often hailed as a quintessentially ‘professional’ historian, I incline to the view implied by Averil Cameron when she demanded: ‘Where are they now, the polymaths like Bury?’Footnote ⁴⁸ It is worth considering earlier incumbents too in terms of such breadth, so that, rather than dismissing a figure such as Charles Kingsley for not being a ‘proper’ historian – an issue which some of his contemporaries mentionedFootnote ⁴⁹ – it is worth considering the kinds of fluidity that are a notable feature of the period and inherent in a notion as protean as ‘history’. Kingsley’s publications span natural history, public health, the Greeks, advice to women, heroism, architecture, the history of science and medicine, and more.Footnote ⁵⁰ It was certainly the case that his royal connections played their part in his appointment.Footnote ⁵¹ As a 1919 article in The Bookman put it:

J. B. Bury was regius professor when this article appeared: he was very far from the tired stereotype articulated here, with his linguistic virtuosity, intrepid travels, witty translations of contemporary verse into Greek and Latin, and his passionate rationalism – not a dry, narrow specialist at all.Footnote ⁵³

By 1860, Kingsley was a successful historical novelist, someone engaged with the social, political, and intellectual affairs of his day. He went to Devon to write Westward Ho! – part of it was set there – describing himself as ‘living in those Elizabethan books’.Footnote ⁵⁴ He published lectures on Alexandria and her Schools, Paracelsus and Vesalius, undertook research for Hypatia, his first historical novel about the female philosopher who died in 415 of the Common Era, and published his Cambridge lectures as The Roman and the Teuton in 1864. Kingsley’s public profile is evident not just from his publications, but from the images of him that proliferated during his lifetime and after his death. Amongst all the Cambridge professors, he has been the most portrayed: there is compelling evidence in London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), founded in 1856. In drawing on materials in its rich archive, I am emphasizing the insights to be gained from an institution required to assess the broad historical significance of those whose portraits were to be admitted to the primary collection, which cannot occur without the approval of trustees. Two members of the lineage, G. M. Trevelyan and Owen Chadwick, served in this capacity, in 1929–54 and 1978–94 respectively. We should note that distinguished academic historians are not necessarily deemed to meet the necessary criteria for admission to the primary collection. The gallery’s secondary collections, mostly prints and photographs, reveal the wealth of author portraits, which have a very long history, including of historians as authors. The gallery’s labels and website assign sitters to categories, allowing us to track changing occupational and social descriptions. Paintings and drawings come with varying amounts of information about provenance, at times scarce but at others wonderfully revealing. In the gallery’s archive it is also possible to learn about loans and exhibitions, showing how, over substantial periods of time, a given portrait has been understood, valued, and displayed.Footnote ⁵⁵ There are forty-seven portraits of Kingsley in the NPG – a drawing, bust, painting, and caricature, together with photographs and prints.

Consider NPG1284, a drawing presented by the artist in January 1901 and based on a photograph, not an obvious format for a major author. Letters from the artist in question, William S. Hunt, articulate his concern that Kingsley, ‘whose works have given pleasure to thousands of English readers’ is not represented in the gallery.Footnote ⁵⁶ The bust of Kingsley by Thomas Woolner, based on the one in Westminster Abbey and thus emphatically celebratory, was then purchased in 1912, while the 1863 painting by Lowes Cato Dickinson arrived, by donation, in 1932 from, significantly enough, a member of the Macmillan family, whose publishing house served several of the regius professors.Footnote ⁵⁷ Publishers have been important commissioners of author portraits. ‘Author’ is a capacious term as we can see from a composite photograph so labelled in which Kingsley appears a year after his death in 1875 – the others are J. S. Mill, Charles Lamb, Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin, and Charles Darwin, all of them English celebrities in the published album.Footnote ⁵⁸ Most biographies, however brief like the one in English celebrities, do mention that Kingsley held the regius chair. The NPG archive also contains drafts of labels from various times. Kingsley is currently ‘novelist and divine’ on the gallery’s excellent website, which captures but part of his multifaceted existence.

Kingsley’s predecessor, fulsomely praised in his inaugural, was Sir James Stephen, a senior colonial administrator and author of the Essays in ecclesiastical history, which gave offence to some. He is represented in the National Portrait Gallery by a bust from 1858 by Marochetti, donated by Sir James’s grandson, Herbert, in 1896 when his uncle, Leslie Stephen, was a trustee of the gallery.Footnote ⁵⁹ Both Leslie, who disliked the bust, and Herbert were assiduous in managing and promoting James’s reputation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Joseph Romilly had judged Sir James ‘a very disagreeable man’ in 1854 when they were both at Trinity Hall for dinner, and letters from him in the guard book certainly suggest he was defensive and difficult: he protested his religious orthodoxy in the light of criticism and was especially prickly about money.Footnote ⁶¹ His broad intellectual interests were evident in the Essays, organized around key religious figures and based on book reviews that had first appeared in the Edinburgh Review: their subjects include Hildebrand and St Francis, the founders of Jesuitism, Martin Luther, Richard Baxter, and William Wilberforce. They are indeed ecumenical. A blend of biography, history, and theology, Stephen got into hot water by denying the existence of eternal damnation and doubting that it is grounded in authority. In order to make this argument, he invokes the linguistic skills required to do justice to the New Testament, indicative perhaps of approaches he encountered in Cambridge when he was a student at the beginning of the century.

Going back one step further to Stephen’s predecessor, William Smyth, we encounter a lively, wide-ranging mind, a figure who has suffered from the condescensions of posterity. Despite being vulnerable to the accusations of ‘jobbery’, as Kingsley was, Smyth clearly took his professorial role rather seriously, judging by a printed list of Books recommended and referred to in the lectures on modern history, which runs to more than twenty pages.Footnote ⁶² Towards the end of his life, he penned Evidences of Christianity, drawing amongst other sources on well-known natural theological arguments.Footnote ⁶³ The interest in commemorating Smyth with the posthumous bust by Baily, and the fact that his book collection contributed significantly to what came to be known as the Seeley Library, invites us to give him more consideration. At the same time, we learn from Romilly that he did good impressions, sang at parties, and could talk entertainingly for hours about the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose son he had tutored.Footnote ⁶⁴ There is an amusing privately printed lecture he gave in 1814 on the theme ‘the history of the world…is the history of women’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Smyth’s humour, however, in no way detracts from the evidence of his sustained engagement with British, European, and American history over many centuries; his expectation that students read in a number of languages, grasp the essence of political economy via Smith and Malthus, encounter the Koran, if only by reading a few chapters, and consult libraries outside Cambridge. It is worth emphasizing that Smyth lectured on contemporary history as well as earlier times – born in 1765, he was well able to remember the French Revolution: his lectures on the subject were reissued in 1855 in ‘Bohn’s Standard Library’, which included major historical works, for example by Ranke, as well as translations of Goethe and Schiller.Footnote ⁶⁶

I have sketched in some notable features of a small number of the (deceased) incumbents allowing some recurrent themes to emerge – ways of understanding ‘history’, the generous scope of their interests, and the sense in which they might be seen as public figures, for example. The 1895 meeting articulated some of the stakes that were present in efforts to commemorate Seeley, who was well known to the reading public, as well as the desire to make memorials as tangible as possible. Portraits provide exceptionally valuable evidence here: they are excellent reputation trackers, revealing relationships between artists, sitters, commissioners, and audiences as well as the workings and priorities of institutions. Records of formal procedures at the National Portrait Gallery provide evidence of the status of occupational groupings at specific moments and also of individuals’ public standing. The portraits of two twentieth-century regius professors shed light on the representation of historians.

The first, George Macaulay Trevelyan (GMT), was Bury’s successor – of the two Bury was much more obviously the ‘professional’ historian. In addition to ten photographs, there are two drawings of Trevelyan in the NPG’s collections: one by Sir William Rothenstein, made in the 1920s and acquired in 1962 when Trevelyan died, and the other by Francis Dodd, who sold it to the gallery in 1944 during Trevelyan’s trusteeship, having executed it eleven years earlier. Cambridge University commissioned a drawing by Dodd of Trevelyan, also in 1933.Footnote ⁶⁷ Rothenstein was a prolific and well-connected portraitist, who knew Trevelyan in London – they were on corresponding terms by 1912.Footnote ⁶⁸ Then, in 1937, Rothenstein published a slim volume, Contemporaries, which included a portrait of Trevelyan. Each image was accompanied by a biographical note, written by a friend of the artist, in this case by H. A. L. Fisher, historian, educator, and politician. While praising Trevelyan’s historical gifts, Fisher hymns him as a ‘stalwart Northumbrian landlord, sportsman and Nature-worshipper’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This format – the combination of portrait image and brief biography, found in eighteenth-century magazines, for instance – reveals the most noteworthy elements of a life at one point in time, with Fisher also emphasizing GMT’s talents as a biographer. His public profile and success as an author are well known and neatly evidenced by a well-produced booklet his publishers Longman, Green and Company circulated around Christmas 1926 in order to promote History of England as a gift.Footnote ⁷⁰ It is illustrated by another portrait drawing, printed on card and stuck on. The biographical details provided are striking. They start with his pedigree as the great-nephew of Macaulay and son of George Otto Trevelyan, even listing some of the latter’s publications. GMT’s own publications are noted, followed by a paragraph that sets the type of history he writes in context:

The reproduction of a sketch by John Mansbridge is telling. The medium of drawing, especially when used in portraits that focus on the face, is considered especially well suited to conveying intimacy.Footnote ⁷² Rothenstein made many such drawings over his life, starting with his student friends at Oxford, while ‘intimacy’ is a theme that will be noted in relation to representations of David Knowles, a more recent post-holder.

Owen Chadwick is the second twentieth-century post-holder whose presence in the NPG invites consideration: he was, like Trevelyan, both an NPG trustee and recipient of the Order of Merit, and someone who engaged exceptionally extensively with his predecessors in the chair.Footnote ⁷³ He is the only incumbent since Acton to have a painted portrait in the gallery, completed in December 1990 by Derek Hill. The commission marked his chairmanship rather than his academic achievements. We have the sitter’s verdict: ‘It is wonderfully generous of NPG to do this for me. I like Derek Hill very much. The portrait is not ME but I admire it much as a piece of portraiture. Owen.’Footnote ⁷⁴ Hill painted many academics, including historians, such as Asa Briggs and Christopher Hill, and his sketchy style is reminiscent of drawing. One biographical feature that links Trevelyan and Chadwick is extensive public service, which, in both cases, drew upon their historical expertise and passions. Academic history more strictly defined finds a less prominent place in the National Portrait Gallery, whether in the role of sitter or trustee, than might be expected. There is little evidence of historians entering the main collection primarily for their achievements as strictly scholarly researchers, even those as notable as regius professors at Cambridge.Footnote ⁷⁵

The fate of a depiction of J. B. Bury illustrates these points. His portrait was offered to the gallery in 2004 by his descendants, but was turned down by curators without being brought to trustees for consideration. Bury was considered eligible in principle, but space was too tight for the offer to be taken further.Footnote ⁷⁶ The painting was then offered to a number of other institutions with which Bury was associated, and has finally found a home in the British School at Athens (Figure 2). Bury travelled in and published extensively on Greece; A history of Greece to the death of Alexander the Great is highly esteemed and enjoyed an extended life in the revised editions by Russell Meiggs, which continued to be recommended to students until recently.Footnote ⁷⁷ So far, I have been unable to find any information on the artist, a Frank Venables, judging by the signature, perhaps a competent amateur known to Bury and his wife Jane, who was herself an artist. Bury was a research powerhouse and formidable linguist. In addition to French and German, Latin and Greek, he had Sanskrit, Syriac, and Hebrew, Hungarian and Russian. Bury’s robust approach to religion sets him apart from so many others in the succession. Born in Ireland where his father was a clergyman in the Church of Ireland, Bury’s anti-clericalism and secular rationalism may derive from experiences in his first forty-one years before he moved to Cambridge in 1902. He had already travelled extensively, but his institutional base was Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), where he was a student, fellow, and then professor of modern history from 1893 as well as regius professor of Greek from 1898.Footnote ⁷⁸

Figure 2. Portrait of J. B. Bury, by ? Frank Venables, 1889. Donated by the Bury family to the BSA Art Collection, reproduced with permission of the British School at Athens. Photography by Elizabeth Cowling.

The case of J. B. Bury encourages reflection on a number of themes, including the ways in which the history of history is undertaken and the manner in which key texts are selected and interpreted. In addition to his publications on Greece and Rome, Bury wrote about Russia for the Cambridge modern history, edited and contributed to the Irish literary journal Kottabus, published on Robert Browning, and penned two books of particular relevance here: A history of freedom of thought (1913) for the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge and The idea of progress, 1920.Footnote ⁷⁹ Freedom of thought was designed for a general audience, ‘written with fire and force’ according to one review.Footnote ⁸⁰ If we also consider Bury’s oeuvre in the light of his numerous contributions to the Rationalist Press Association Annuals, a more rounded picture emerges. He may have hated administrative tasks, been consumed by a phenomenal work drive and impatient with the Cambridge Historical Tripos as he found it, but here was a man of conviction and commitment, whose writings benefit from being interpreted accordingly. In histories of history, it is his inaugural lecture that commands most attention, prompting attempts to treat it as a theoretical statement and to reconcile it with his other publications. Bury’s comments in that lecture, ‘The science of history’, delivered in the Divinity School on 26 January 1903, and critiqued by Trevelyan, have been treated quite selectively. The end of the address – ‘though she [i.e. history] may supply material for literary art or philosophical speculation, she is herself simply a science, no less and no more’ – is repeatedly cited, but generally out of the context of his life and work as a whole and without considering the rhetorical strategies that Bury was deploying. In that last paragraph, for example, Bury invokes a strikingly violent image – ‘stripping the bandages of error from the eyes of men’ – arguably a deliberate provocation, while his invocation of the advancement of science served his wider purposes as a critic of institutions and societies dominated by religion.

‘Science’ is as protean a notion as ‘history’; historians of science have had much to say about the delineation of ‘the scientific method’ and of ‘science’ over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that is, about their elevation to quasi-mythical status and availability for strategic use.Footnote ⁸¹ We should beware of making facile assumptions when reading such terms, of treating their meanings and uses as self-evident. Given Bury’s interest in the French Enlightenment and figures such as Condorcet, and in Comte and Spencer,Footnote ⁸² his commitment to tracking changing understanding and practice with respect to freedom of thought and notions of progress was bound to involve engagement with ‘science’, including the history of science. Bury clearly possessed a grasp of Darwin’s evolutionary explanations, for example.Footnote ⁸³ The state of the world when he wrote The idea of progress was for him only temporary, and it is ‘the wonderful history of science in the last hundred years’ that had enabled commentators to gain this insight. Accordingly, he suggests, the value of the idea of progress is itself transient. I take the Preface to the book, written in January 1920, with its references to war and peace, to socialism and Russia, to a crisis of Western civilization, to be a political statement. This is not to doubt Bury’s deep interest in the nature of knowledge, but to try and reach for the passions that manifestly lay behind his claims about science, passions that, for the sake of economy, I suggest may usefully be thought of as ‘political’ – enabling the blinded to see suggests as much.

Like so many of his fellow regius professors, Bury generated a substantial body of published work for later generations to work on and puzzle over. And like them, he has been interpreted, quoted, and name checked as convenient by later historians.Footnote ⁸⁴ Shortly after his death in 1927, two substantial accounts appeared, both born out of friendship; in 1929 by Norman Baynes, a Byzantinist in London, and the following year by the modern historian, Harold Temperley of Peterhouse. Many of the incumbents have been similarly remembered and represented, including William Smyth, James Stephen, Charles Kingsley, John Seeley, George Macaulay Trevelyan, and Owen Chadwick. In reflecting on commemorative drives, we might consider ideas of honour, respect, appreciation, and achievement, as if the curriculum vitae unproblematically elicits the response. Scholarly work on heroism could encourage us to go further, and think about forms of identification, where affective relationships are involved.Footnote ⁸⁵ Forms of friendship and affection are central to responses to key figures; accordingly it is worth asking whether the notion of a labour of love might sometimes be appropriate, for instance, when applied to the extraordinarily meticulous work Norman Baynes did to commemorate Bury, despite the profound differences between them on matters of religion.Footnote ⁸⁶ Baynes’s memoir drew on materials from Bury’s widow as well as his own memory and expertise, yet he is by no means uncritical of the work by the man he esteemed so highly.

Biography and portraiture taken in their widest senses inevitably raise these questions about forms of commemoration, types of affinity, mentorship, friendship, and affection within occupational contexts.Footnote ⁸⁷ But the theme of love is inescapable when it comes to Rev’d David Knowles, born Clive Michael, who was manifestly so much loved by those who knew him and worked with him, perhaps precisely because it was a complex life, marked in some phases by considerable struggle, yet one so profoundly interwoven with the subjects he studied – a monk examining monasticism – that the person and their researches are inseparable. Knowles’s entire life needs to be understood in the context of his vocation, albeit a somewhat unorthodox one, at times in conflict with his order. There is a striking intimacy here between person and work, between spiritual and intellectual life, between him and his colleagues and friends that propelled those close to him to record their affection in an unusually open way, invoking, for example, Thomas Hardy, whose novels Knowles loved: he ‘was a good man and did good things’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Depictions of him capture an austere simplicity that chimes with the tenderness expressed in tributes paid to him (Figure 3). According to David Crystal, ‘Anniversaries make us reflect.’Footnote ⁸⁹ In that spirit, I offer here some brief reflections on the task of marking three hundred years since the institution

Figure 3. Dom David Knowles, by Aidan Savage, 1926. By kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Photography by Rachel Leow.

of the regius chair of modern history, which has necessarily entailed tough selection processes. For some of the early figures, little material is available. Although Seeley has received much attention, the nature and range of his writings together with the detailed account of the 1895 meeting invited further consideration, especially given his alleged status as the founding father of Cambridge history. Seeley’s connections with bookselling and publishing, his poetry, and his project to make Goethe better known invite us to think of him in a more rounded way. Further, the diary of a young American woman in Cambridge, who attended Seeley’s lectures and met him socially, gives a very different impression of the man and his family from the claim in the ODNB article that he and his wife were not ‘at the centre of an agreeable social circle; he…lacked lightness of touch…they entertained badly’.Footnote ⁹⁰ While I knew of Dom David Knowles, the emotional qualities suffusing commentaries on him were particularly striking. In acknowledging his complex, austere life, writers, especially Christopher Brooke, delineate a man of ‘exceptional endowment’ – ‘it was hard for those who knew him well not to feel the world much poorer for his passing’.Footnote ⁹¹ The contrast with Seeley’s successor Lord Acton, is noteworthy – he has been admired and respected rather than loved. Acton’s legacy, not least the acquisition of his magnificent library for Cambridge, is undoubtedly important. ‘One of the most significant figures in the intellectual and political life of Victorian England’ according to one commentator, Acton is more discussed than Bury in histories of history, with his work for the Cambridge modern history receiving special notice.Footnote ⁹² A 1930 pamphlet for the Historical Association, which considered the inaugural lectures of the Oxford and Cambridge regius chairs since 1841, deployed a striking metaphor. Leonard Southern Wood gave pride of place to Acton: ‘I began to write this paper thinking I was listening to an Orchestra of eighteen strings. Before I had finished I realised that I was listening to a solo with orchestral accompaniment. The soloist is Acton.’Footnote ⁹³

These points illustrate some of the difficulties the study of the history of history throws up, since the criteria for selecting the most noteworthy figures and what makes them so are rarely fully articulated. One issue is our complex, sometimes semi-conscious, reactions to forebears, another is the genuine challenge of assessing their significance and doing so in the contexts of their times, which include the publishing industries and the institutional infrastructures within which they operated as well as the political, economic, social, and familial factors in play. While canons are never static, something very like a canon has emerged, with a certain number of texts and authors, such as Acton, repeatedly cited. Bury’s inaugural, and the endless quotation of a few phrases from it, are a case in point, where his claim about history as a science is quoted, generally without a meaningful discussion of what the claim might actually mean.Footnote ⁹⁴ J. B. Bury has emerged as a fascinating, complex figure, the only historian to hold the chair who published on ancient, medieval, and modern history, with the enigmatic Knowles as the only other medievalist. Bury was in fact a staunch supporter of modern history.

The history of a specific post is a curious object of historical analysis. One difficulty that faces a historian of the Cambridge chair is the large number of contingent factors that led to one person rather than another being appointed. Even the mechanism of appointment seems to have varied, with the monarch and the prime minister involved to varying degrees. There was clearly consultation in the past, since we know that no one wanted Oscar Browning – the historian, bon viveur, and Cambridge character – to be appointed when Seeley died.Footnote ⁹⁵ These matters were openly mentioned in newspapers, for example. There was nothing logical or inexorable about the sequence of appointments. Models of professionalization might encourage the thought that a direction of travel is discernible. Was Trevelyan more of a ‘professional’ than Seeley? Bury, appointed 1902, seemingly stood out in just this respect – he possessed the type of commitment to research and publishing in specialist journals from the very start of his career that is more commonly found well into the post-war period. But he was far more than a professionalized, specialized historian and his literary concerns never died. It is worth recalling here that Knowles published on the American Civil War and on Macaulay as well as on monasticism.Footnote ⁹⁶

It does not follow, however, that the story of the chair is a mere succession of individuals. Institutional memory was robust, with many of the incumbents engaging with their predecessors, especially in their inaugural lectures. The past of this position concerns university administration, financial arrangements, and political-cum-intellectual commitments just as much as ‘historical theory’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Large, complex phenomena – the changing map of knowledge, shifts in disciplinary definitions and in pedagogy, student demographics, reform in the university sector – all played a part. One shift, or rather suite of shifts, is particularly striking – the kinds of communities that the professors were part of. Romilly’s diaries are particularly instructive in this respect for in them we glimpse the forms of sociability, friendships, and intimacies that were possible in a small institution in a small town, and this sense emerges too from the life of John Neville Keynes, the political economist and registrary. The power of heads of house and the centrality of colleges formed a central feature of the Cambridge lives of most incumbents; it is fortunate that colleges are still able to provide something akin to Romilly’s and Smyth’s experiences, while the machinery of the central university is in no way comparable to that of even a century ago when Keynes was reaching the end of his career.

There can be no simple answers to the question about what has changed since 1724, since it is implausible that ready narratives exist waiting to be plucked and then served up from the immense volume of source material, especially given the huge number of factors at work. Continuities should not be neglected. It has been possible here only to make some tentative suggestions about ways we might think about the history of the post, recognizing that the history the incumbents practised, like the broad contexts in which they did so, have been magnificently diverse. There is no virtue in tying ‘history’ down, but there is immense value in constantly reassessing how we tell the history of history, by thinking about publishers, administration, institutional memory, teaching, forms of portrayal, whether verbal or visual, identities, friendships, ideas, and deepest commitments, as well as the craftsmanship of researching and writing that are inherent in the role of historian.