The historical assassination of Burke

Conor Cruise O'Brien describes in The Great Melody (1992) how the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke was, until the First World War, a revered figure, his writings a storehouse of political wisdom for both British Liberals and Tories. A prewar view of Burke can be found in the 1911 Britannica entry, which judges, for example, that Burke's speeches opposing the British government's attempts to crush the American Revolution "are almost the one monument of the struggle on which a lover of English greatness can look back with pride and a sense of worthiness, such as a churchman feels when he reads Bossuet, or an Anglican when he turns over the pages of Taylor or of Hooker." However, O'Brien describes how, beginning in the 1920s, Burke's reputation went into eclipse, from which it has begun to emerge only in the last few decades. The postwar ejection of Burke from the pantheon of British culture heroes thus seems to have been a small but not insignificant part of the slide into self-loathing on the part of the cultural vanguard of Britain, and of the West in general.

Thanks to O'Brien we have a description of how this cultural defacement took place in the case of Burke. It was, he says, the work of the historian Lewis Namier and of the successors who accepted the assumptions of the "great historian". His basic techniques were to refuse to give Burke the close attention due to him as a central figure in the period studied by Namier (and as the very source of the "Whig interpretation of history" which Namier was setting out to discredit), while at the same time repeatedly casting aspersions on Burke that were sufficiently casual so as not to require any evidence. People trusted Namier even in the absence of evidence, because he was known to have studied the period closely. That trust was misplaced.

Namier never refuted, or even seriously set out to refute, the assessments of Burke by Macaulay, or G.O. Trevelyan or Morley [in the Britannica]. The method was more original and more effective. He wrote as if the refutation was an accomplished fact. In his demolishing asides, he assumes that only a simpleton could now believe that Burke should be taken seriously. And nobody wants to to be taken as a simpleton [xlii].

(There is much more detail in O'Brien's introduction for those interested.) But was this really an original or unique tactic on the part of Namier? My impression is that it is a widespread method for smearing the memory of revered figures, which finds a large uncritical audience.