"Who now questions, to mention an extreme instance, that Anne Boleyn's death was the result of the licentious caprice of Henry? and yet her own father, the Earl of Wiltshire, her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, the hero of Flodden Field, the Privy Council, the House of Lords, the Archbishop and Bishopsm, the House of Commons, the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and three other juries, assented without, as far as we know, an opposing voice, to the proofs of her guilt, and approved of the execution of the sentence against her."

Froude was not, however, so much absorbed in the work of his life that he could not form and express strong opinions upon the great events passing around him. His view of the Russian war and of the French alliance was set forth with much plainness of speech in a letter to Max Muller:*

"I felt in the autumn (and you were angry at me for saying so) that the very worst thing which could happen for Europe would be the success of the policy with which France and England were managing things. Happily the gods were against it too, as now, after having between us wasted sixty millions of money and fifty thousand human lives, we are beginning to discover. But I have no hope that things will go right, or that men will think reasonably, until they have first exhausted every mode of human folly. I still think Louis Napoleon the d—d'est rascal in Europe (for which again you will be angry with me), and that his reception the other day in London will hereafter appear in history as simply the most shameful episode in the English annals. Thinking this, you will not consider my opinion good for anything, and therefore I need not inflict it upon you. Humbugs, however, will explode in the present state of the atmosphere, and the Austrian humbug, for instance, is at last, God be praised for it, exploding. John Bull, I suppose, will work himself into a fine fever about that; but he will think none the worse of the old ladies in Downing Street who are made fools of: and will be none the better disposed to listen to people who told him all along how it would be. However, in the penal fatuity which has taken possession of our big bow-wow people, and in even the general folly, I see great ground for comfort to quiet people like myself; and if I live fifteen years, I still hope I shall see a Republic among us."

— * April 30th, 1855. —

Froude's Republicanism did not last. His opinion of Louis Napoleon never altered.

CHAPTER IV

THE HISTORY

"It has not yet become superfluous to insist," said the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge on the 26th of January, 1903, "that history is a science, no less and no more." If this view is correct and exhaustive, Froude was no historian. He must remain outside the pale in the company of Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Mommsen. Among literary historians, the special detestation of the pseudo-scientific school, Froude was pre-eminent. Few things excite more suspicion than a good style, and no theory is more plausible than that which associates clearness of expression with shallowness of thought. Froude, however, was no fine writer, no coiner of phrases for phrases' sake. A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be. He had a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach. "The Reformation," he said, "was the hinge on which all modern history turned,"* and he regarded the Reformation as a revolt of the laity against the clergy, rather than a contest between two sets of rival dogmas for supremacy over the human mind. That is the key of the historical position which he took up from the first, and always defended. He held the Church of Rome to have been the enemy of human freedom, and of British independence. He was devoid of theological prejudice, and never reviled Catholicism as Newman reviled it before his conversion. But he held that the reformers, alike in England, in France, and in Germany, were fighting for truth, honesty, and private judgment against priestcraft and ecclesiastical tyranny. The scepticism and cynicism of which he was often accused were on the surface. They were provoked by what he felt to be hypocrisy and sham. They were not his true self. He believed firmly unflinchingly, and always in "the grand, simple landmarks of morality," which existed before all Churches, and would exist if all Churches disappeared.

Ou gar tanun ge kachthes, all' aei pote Ze tauta, koudeis oiden ex hotou phane

["For they are not of today or yesterday, but these things live for ever, but no one knows from whence they appear." Sophocles, Antigone, 456.]

Before Abraham was they were, and it is impossible to imagine a time when they will have ceased to be.

— * Lectures on the Council of Trent, p. 1. —

Froude was an Erastian, holding that the Church should be subordinate to the State. True religion is incompatible with persecution. But true religion is rare, and the best modern security against the persecutor is the secular power. Mr. Spurgeon once excited great applause from members of his Church by declaring that the Baptists had never persecuted. When the cheers had subsided he explained that it was because they had never had a chance. Froude was convinced that ecclesiastics could not be trusted, and that they would oppress the laity unless the laity muzzled them. He held that the reformers had been calumniated, that their services were in danger of being forgotten, and that the modern attempt to ignore the Reformation was not only unhistorical, but disingenuous. He wrote partly to rehabilitate them, and partly to prove that Henry VIII. had conferred great benefits upon England by his repudiation of Papal authority. He took, as he considered it his duty to take, the side of individual liberty against ecclesiastical authority, and of England against Rome. The idea that an historian was to have no opinions of his own, or that, having them, he was to conceal them, never entered his mind.

That Froude had any prejudice against the Church of England as such is a baseless fancy. He believed in the Church of his childhood, and, unless the word be used in the narrow sense of the clerical profession, he never left it to the end of his days. It was to him, as it was to his father, a Protestant Church, out of communion with Rome, cut off from the Pope and his court by the great upheaval of the sixteenth century. It is unreasonable, and indeed foolish, to say that that opinion disqualified him to be the historian of Henry VIII., and Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth. The Catholicism of Lingard is not considered to be a disqualification by sensible Protestants. Froude's faults as an historian were of a different kind, and had nothing to do with his ecclesiastical views. He was not the only Erastian, nor was he an Erastian pure and simple. He has left it on record that Macaulay's unfairness to Cranmer in the celebrated review of Hallam's Constitutional History first suggested to him the project of his own book. His besetting sin was not so much Erastianism, or secularism, as a love of paradox. Henry VIII seemed to him not merely a great statesman and a true patriot, but a victim of persistent misrepresentation, whose lofty motives had been concealed, and displaced by vile, baseless calumnies. More and Fisher, honoured for three centuries as saints, he suspected, and, as he thought, discovered to have been traitors who justly expiated their offences on the block. He was not satisfied with proving that there was a case for Henry, and that the triumph of Rome would have been the end of civil as well as spiritual freedom: he must go on to whitewash the tyrant himself, and to prove that his marriage with Anne Boleyn, like his separation from Katharine of Aragon, was simply the result of an unselfish desire to provide the country with a male heir. The refusal of More and Fisher to acknowledge the royal supremacy may show that they were Catholics first and Englishmen afterwards, without impugning their personal integrity, or justifying the malice of Thomas Cromwell. To judge Henry as if he were a constitutional king with a secure title, in no more danger from Catholics than Louis XIV was from Huguenots, is doubtless preposterous. If the Catholics had got the upper hand, they would have deposed him, and put him to death. In that fell strife of mighty opposites the voice of toleration was not raised, and would not have been heard. Tyrant as he was himself, Henry in his battle against Rome did represent the English people, and his cause was theirs. Froude brought out this great truth, and to bring it out was a great service. Unfortunately he went too far the other way, and impartial readers who had no sympathy with Cardinal Campeggio were revolted by what looked like a defence of cruel persecution. The welfare of a nation is more important in history than the observance of any marriage; and if Henry had been guided by mere desire, there was no reason why he should marry Anne Boleyn at all. Froude's achievement, which, despite all criticism, remains, was marred or modified by his too obvious zeal for upsetting established conclusions and reversing settled beliefs.

The moment that Froude had made up his mind, which was not till after long and careful research, he began to paint a picture. The lights were delicately and adroitly arranged. The artist's eye set all accessories in the most telling positions. He was an advocate, an incomparably brilliant advocate, in his mode of presenting a case. But it was his own case, the case in which he believed, not a case he had been retained to defend. When he came to deal with Elizabeth he was on firmer ground. By that time the Reformation was an accomplished fact, and the fiercest controversies lay behind him. Disgusted as he was with the scandals invented against the virgin queen, he did not shrink from exposing the duplicity and meanness which tarnish the lustre of her imperishable renown. Like Knox, he was insensible to the charms of Mary Stuart, and that is a deficiency hard to forgive in a man. Yet who can deny that Elizabeth only did to Mary as Mary would have done to her? The morality of the Guises was as much a part of Mary as her scholarship, her grace, her profound statecraft, the courage which a voluptuous life never imparted. Froude was not thinking of her, or of any woman. He was thinking of England. Between the fall of Wolsey and the defeat of the Armada was decided the great question whether England should be Catholic or Protestant, bond or free. The dazzling Queen of Scots, like the virtuous Chancellor and the holy Bishop, were on the wrong side. Henry and Elizabeth, with all their faults, were on the right one. That is the pith and marrow of Froude's book. Those who think that in history there is no side may blame him. He followed Carlyle. "Froude is a man of genius," said Jowett: "he has been abominably treated." "Il a vu iuste," said a young critic of our own day* in reply to the usual charges of inaccuracy. The real object of his attack was that ecclesiastical corruption which belongs to no Church exclusively, and is older than Christianity itself.

— * Arthur Strong. —

The main portion of Froude's life for nearly twenty years was occupied with his History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is on a large scale, in twelve volumes. Every chapter bears ample proof of laborious study. Froude neglected no source of information, and spared himself no pains in pursuit of it. At the Record Office, in the British Museum, at Hatfield, among the priceless archives preserved in the Spanish village of Simancas, he toiled with unquenchable ardour and unrelenting assiduity. Nine-tenths of his authorities were in manuscript. They were in five languages. They filled nine hundred volumes. Excellent linguist as he was, Froude could hardly avoid falling into some errors. With his general accuracy as an historian I shall have to deal in a later part of this book. Here I am only concerned to prove that he took unlimited pains. He kept no secretary, he was his own copyist, and he was not a good proof- reader. Those natural blots, quas aut incuria fudit, aut humaria parum cavit natura, are to be found, no doubt, in his pages. From a conscientious obedience to truth as he understood it, and a resolute determination to present it as he saw it, he never swerved. He was not a chronicler, but an artist, a moralist, and a man of genius. Unless an historian can put himself into the place of the men about whom he is writing, think their thoughts, share their hopes, their aspirations, and their fears, he had better be taking a healthy walk than poring over dusty documents. A paste-pot, a pair of scissors, the mechanical precision of a copying clerk, are all useful in their way; but they no more make an historian than a cowl makes a monk.

Polloi men narthekophoroi Bakchoi de te pauroi ["There are many officials, but few inspired." Zenobius, 5.77]

There are many writers of history, but very few historians. Froude wrote with a definite purpose, which he never concealed from himself, or from others. He believed, and he thought he could prove, that the Reformation freed England from a cruel and degrading yoke, that the things which were Caesar's should be rendered to Caesar, and that the Church should be restricted within its own proper sphere. Those, if such there be, who think that an historian should have no opinions are entitled to condemn him. Those who simply disagree with him are not. No man is hindered by any other cause than laziness, incompetence, or more immediately profitable occupations, from writing a history of the same period in exactly the opposite sense.

Froude's earliest chapters were set in type, and distributed among a few friends whose judgment he trusted. The most sympathetic was Carlyle, who pronounced the introductory survey of England's social condition at the opening of the sixteenth century to be just what it ought to have been. Carlyle's marginal notes upon the first two chapters are extremely interesting, and doubly characteristic, because they illustrate at the same time his practical shrewdness and his intense prejudice. For these reasons, and also because in many instances his advice was followed, it may be worth while to give some account of his pencil jottings, written when Carlyle's hand was still firm, and as legible as they were fifty years ago. Upon the first chapter as a whole, Carlyle's judgment, though critical, was highly favourable.

"This," he wrote, "is a vigorous, sunny, calm, and wonderfully effective delineation; pleasant to read; and bids fair to give much elucidation to what is coming. Curious too as got mainly from good reading of the Statutes at large! Might there be with advantage (or not) some subdivision into sections, with headings, etc? Also, here and there, some condensation of the excerpts given—condensation into narrative where too longwinded? Item, for symmetry's sake (were there nothing else) is not some outline of spiritual England a little to be expected? Or will that come piece-meal as we proceed? Hint, then, somewhere to that effect? Also remember a little that there was an Europe as well as an England? In sum, Euge." Such praise from such a man was balm to Froude's wounds and tonic to his nerves. Practically expelled from his college, regarded by his own family as almost a black sheep, he found himself taken up, and treated as an equal, by a writer of European fame, whom of all his contemporaries he most admired. In deference to Carlyle he rewrote his opening paragraphs, and added useful dates. European history and spiritual England do come into far greater prominence "as we proceed." The abbreviation and summary of extracts might, I think, have been carried farther with advantage. But it is curious that Froude was attacked for the precisely opposite fault of treating his authorities with too much freedom. Carlyle, who knew what historical labour was, saw at once that Froude dealt with his material as a born student and an ardent lover of truth. His suggestions were always excellent, as sound and just as they were careful and kind. One criticism, which Froude disregarded, shows not only Carlyle's wide knowledge (that appears throughout), but also that his long residence south of the Tweed never made him really English. It refers to Froude's description of the English volunteers at Calais who "were for years the terror of Normandy," and of Englishmen generally as "the finest people in all Europe," nurtured in profuse abundance on "great shins of beef."

"This," says Carlyle, "seems to me exaggerated; what we call John- Bullish. The English are not, in fact, stronger, braver, truer, or better than the other Teutonic races: they never fought better than the Dutch, Prussians, Swedes, etc., have done. For the rest, modify a little: Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops (bread boiled in beer), Robert Burns on oatmeal porridge; and Mahomet and the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal."

David Hume would have thoroughly approved of this note. Froude's patriotism was incorrigible, and he left the passage as it stood. A little farther on Carlyle's hatred of political economy, in which Froude fully shared, breaks out with amusing vigour. "If," wrote the younger historian, "the tendency of trade to assume a form of mere self-interest be irresistible," etc. "And is it?" comments the elder. "Let us all get prussic acid, then." A recent speculator preferred cyanide of potassium. But if "mere self-interest" comprises fraudulent balance-sheets, it cannot claim any support from political economy. When Carlyle drew up a petition to the House of Commons for amending the law of copyright, he was guided by self- interest, but it was not a counsel of despair. The City Companies, says Froude, "are all which now remain of a vast organisation which once penetrated the entire trading life of England—an organisation set on foot to realise that impossible condition of commercial excellence under which man should deal faithfully with his brother, and all wares offered for sale, of whatever kind, should honestly be what they pretend to be."

For "impossible" Carlyle proposed "highly necessary, if highly difficult," and a similar change was made. But why people who do not understand political economy should be more honest than those who do neither master nor disciple condescended to explain. It is much easier to preach than to argue. More valuable than these gibes is Carlyle's reminder that guilds were not peculiar to England.

"In Lubeck, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Dantzig, not to speak of Venice, Genoa, Pisa,—George Hudson and the Gospel of Cheap and Nasty were totally unknown entities. The German Gilds even made poetry together; Herr Sachs of Nurnberg was one of the finest pious genial master shoemakers that ever lived anywhere—his shoes and rhymes alike genuine (I can speak for the rhymes) and worthy."

It is strange that Carlyle should have taken the trouble to correct a misquotation from Juvenal, and still stranger that Froude should have left the words uncorrected. Misquotation was a too frequent habit with him. In his second chapter he applies to Henry the famous passage in Tacitus's character of Galba, and changes capax imperii to dignus imperil, though dignus would have required imperio, and would then have made inferior sense. Some of Carlyle's queries were productive of really substantial results; for instance, the simple words "such as" brought out the fact that the spoils of the monasteries were in part devoted to national defence. "Inveterate frenzy" is Froude's description of the years covered by the reign of Edward IV. "Fine healthy years in the main, for all their fighting," notes Carlyle. "See the Paston Letters, for one proof." Some of his recommendations are racily colloquial. "Give us time of day" is his mode of asking for more dates. Henry's instructions to his Secretary or Ambassador at Rome he pronounces "very rough matter to set upon the table uncooked," and recommends an Appendix, unluckily without avail. "Abridge, redact," he exclaims towards the end, but there was no abridgment and no redaction. On the other hand, "prestige," stigmatised by Carlyle as "a bad newspaper word," was rejected for "influence," and his insistence that English only should be used in the text, foreign languages being confined to notes, was accepted by Froude. That "new doctrines ever gain readiest hearing among the common people" he left to stand as a general proposition, although, as Carlyle reminded him, "in Germany it was by no means the common people who believed Luther first, but the Elector of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, etc., etc.—Scotland too."

The conclusion at which Carlyle arrived after reading the second chapter is less favourable than his verdict upon the first. Inasmuch, however, as some of the modifications suggested were made, though by no means all of them, and as Carlyle's notions of history are worth knowing on their own account, I will transcribe his words, which are dated the 27th of September, 1855:

"This chapter contains a great deal of well meditated knowledge, just insight, and sound thinking; seems calculated to explain the Phaenomenon of the Reformation to an unusual degree, in fact has great merit of many kinds, historical among the rest. But it seems to me (1) to be more of a Dissertation than a Narrative; to want dates, specific details, outline of every kind. (2) The management might surely be mended? It does not "begin at the beginning" (which indeed is the most difficult of all things, but also the most indispensable); the story is not clear; or rather, as hinted above, there is no story, but an explanation of some story supposed to be already known, which is contrary to rule in writing 'History.' On the whole, the Author seems to have such a conception of the subject as were well worth a better setting forth; and if this is all he has yet written of his Book, I could almost advise him to start afresh, and remodel all this second chapter. This is a high demand; but the excellence attainable by him seems also high. The rule throughout is, that events should speak. Commentary ought to be sparing; clear insight, definite conviction, brought about with a minimum of Commentary; that is always the Art of History. Alter or not, however, there is such a generous breadth of intelligence, of manly sympathy, sound judgment, and in general of luminous solidity, promised in this Book, that I will gladly read it, however it be put together. Would it not be better to specify a little what Martin Luther is about, and keep up a chronological intercourse, more or less strict, with the great Continental ocean of Reform, the better to understand the tides from it that ebb and flow in these Narrow Seas? Some notice of Wiclif too I expected in some form or other. Once more, Go on and prosper!"

The notice of Wycliffe does seem a rather unreasonable expectation, and a history of England loses identity if it becomes a history of Europe. But Carlyle's principles, whether he always acted upon them himself or no, are excellent, and, though Froude's second chapter was not quite rewritten, the effect of them may be seen in the rest of the book.

Carlyle's influence upon Froude, which happily never extended to his style, confirmed him in his attachment to Protestantism and his hatred of Rome. It also accounted for much of Froude's belief in despots. In democracy he had no faith. Manhood suffrage in England, would, he thought, even in the wonderful year 1588, the last of his History, have restored the Pope. This was perhaps a little inconsistent with his theory that Henry VIII. had been popular with all classes. Yet at least Froude could distinguish one despot from another. He was entirely opposed, as we have seen, to the alliance with Louis Napoleon against Russia, which culminated in the Crimean War. Otherwise his sympathy with Liberalism was chiefly academic. He rejoiced in the University Commission, and in the consequent removal of religious tests for undergraduates. But he took Carlyle's Latter- Day Pamphlets for gospel, and had no faith in peace by great Exhibitions, or progress by political reform. The war with Russia justified the first part of his creed, and even Liberals in the House of Commons seemed tacitly to agree with the second. To the glorification of mere money-making, the worship of the golden calf, the sincerest and the most fashionable of all worships, both he and Carlyle were equally opposed. They were agreed with the Socialists and with Ruskin in their dislike of seeing bricks and mortar substituted for green fields, smoky chimneys for church towers, myriads of factory hands for the rural population of England. Carlyle still called himself a Radical, a believer in root and branch change, but moral rather than political. His faith in representative institutions had been shaken by reflecting that the Long Parliament, the best ever assembled in England, would have given up the cause of the Civil War if it had not been for Cromwell and the army. Although he had been one of Peel's warmest supporters in 1846, he had come to dread Liberalism as tending towards anarchy, and he adopted the singular verbal fallacy that a low franchise would mean a low standard of politics. Froude, though he still called himself a Liberal, and in some respects always was so, swore by Carlyle, acknowledged him as his master, and repeated his creed. Carlyle had many admirers, but few disciples, and he naturally set great value on Froude's adhesion. He had always a great contempt for universal suffrage. It would have given, he said grimly, the same voice in the government of Palestine to Jesus Christ and to Judas Iscariot. But whatever might have happened to Judas, the Son of man had not where to lay His head, and would certainly have been excluded under any system which met the approval of Carlyle. In Latter-Day Pamphlets Carlyle had made a tremendous attack upon Downing Street, and the administrative deficiencies which the Crimean campaign disclosed could be treated as confirmatory evidence in his favour. As a matter of fact, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston were all the same to him. He was denouncing the Parliamentary system, which has borne up against worse Ministers than the Duke of Newcastle. If Sebastopol had been taken after the Alma, as it well might have been, Carlyle would not have altered his tone. Nothing would have prevented him from delivering his message, or Froude from accepting it.

The first two volumes of the History appeared in 1856. They dealt with the latter part of Henry's reign, when he had rid himself of Wolsey, and was personally ruling England with the aid of Thomas Cromwell. Froude had to describe the dissolution of the monasteries, and besides describing he justified it. He had to depict the absolute government of Henry; and he argued that it was a necessity of the times. We must not transfer the passions of one age to the controversies of another. In the seventeenth century the issue was between the Stuart kings and their Parliaments, or, in other words, between the Crown and the people. In the sixteenth century king and Parliament were united against an alien power, the Catholic Church, and a foreign prince, the Pope. Before England was free she had to become Protestant, and Henry, whatever his motives, was on the Protestant side. That he was himself an unscrupulous tyrant is beside the point. He was an ephemeral phaemomenon, and, as a matter of fact, his tyranny, which the people never felt, died with him. The Church of Rome was a permanent fact, immortal, if not unchangeable, which would have reduced England, if it had prevailed, to the condition of France, Italy, and Spain. Whether Henry VIII. was a good man, or a bad one, is not the question. Bishop Stubbs, who cannot be accused of anti-ecclesiastical, or anti-theological prejudice, calls him a "grand, gross figure," not to be tried and condemned by ordinary standards of private morals. The only interest of his character now is its bearing upon the fate of England. If the Pope, and not the king, had become head of the English Church, would it have been for the advantage of the English people? By frankly taking the king's side Froude made two different and influential sets of enemies, especially at Oxford. High Churchmen, then and for the rest of his life, assailed him for hostility to "the Church," forgetting or ignoring the fact that the Church of England is not the Church of Rome. Liberals, on the other hand, mistook him for a friend of lawless despotism, as if Henry's opponents had been constitutional statesmen, and not arrogant Churchmen, hating liberty even more than he did.

That Froude had no faith in modern Liberalism is true enough. His political leader in 1856 was neither Palmerston nor Cobden, but Carlyle. In 1529 he would have been a King's man and not a Pope's man, an Englishman first and a Churchman afterwards. Lord Melbourne used to declare, in his paradoxical manner, that Henry VIII. was the greatest man who ever lived, because he always had his own way.

Strength is not greatness, and Melbourne must not be taken literally. What can be pleaded for Henry, without paradox and with truth, is that he imposed upon Catholic and Protestant alike the supremacy of the law. Froude preached the subordination of the Church to the State; and while supporters of the voluntary principle regarded him with suspicion, adherents to the sacerdotal principle shrank from him with horror.

The reviews of Froude's earliest volumes were mostly unfavourable. The Times indeed was appreciative and sympathetic. But The Christian Remembrancer was emphatic in its censure, and The Edinburgh Review, of which Henry Reeve had just become editor, was vehemently hostile.

After all, however, an author depends, not upon this party, nor upon that party, but upon the general public. The public took to Froude's History from the first. They took to it because it interested them, and carried them on. Paradoxical it might be. Partial it might be. Readable it undoubtedly was. Parker's confidence was more than justified. The book sold as no history had sold except Gibbon's and Macaulay's. There were no obscure, no ugly sentences. The reader was carried down the stream with a motion all the pleasanter because it was barely perceptible. The name of the author was in all mouths. His old college perceived that he was a credit, not a disgrace to it, and the Rector of Exeter* courteously invited him to replace his name on the books. The Committee of the Athenaeum elected him an honorary member of the Club. Even the Archdeacon, now a very old man, discovered at last that his youngest son was an honour to the name of Froude. He knew something of ecclesiastical history, and he understood that the character of Henry, which certainly left much to be desired, might have been blackened of set purpose by ecclesiastical historians. Froude's reputation was made. The reviewers, most of whom knew nothing about the subject, could not hurt him. He had followed his bent, and chosen his vocation well. The gift of narrative was his, and he had had thoughts of turning novelist. But to write a novel, or at least a successful novel, was a thing he could never do. He had not the spirit of romance. If there was anything romantic in him, it was love of England, and of the sea. From the ocean rovers of Elizabeth to the colonial path-finders of his own day, he delighted in men who carried the name and fame of England to distant places of the earth. He was an advocate rather than a judge. He held so strongly the correctness of his own views, and the importance of having a right judgment in all things, that he sometimes gave undue prominence to the facts which supported his theory. It was only fair and reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic of Froude as an historian. That he deliberately falsified history is a baseless delusion. A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it would have been difficult to find. An artist he could not help being, for it was in the blood. Once his fingers grasped the pen, they began instinctively to draw a picture. He was not, like Macaulay, a rhetorician. He had inherited from his father a contempt for oratory, and he did not speak well in public. But when he had studied a period he saw it in a series of moving scenes as the figures passed along the stage. That he was not always accurate in detail is notorious. Accuracy is a question of degree. There are mistakes in Macaulay. There are mistakes in Gibbon. Humanum est effete. An historian must be judged not by the number of slips he has made in names or dates, but by the general conformity of his representation with the object. Canaletto painted pictures of Venice in which there was not a palace out of drawing, nor a brick out of place. Yet not all Canaletto's Venetian pictures would give a stranger much idea of the atmosphere of Venice. Glance at one Turner, in which a Venetian could hardly identify a building or a canal, and there lies before you the Queen of the Sea. Serious blunders have been discovered by microscopic criticism in Carlyle's French Revolution; it remains the most vivid and impressive version of a tremendous drama that has ever been given to the world. Froude and Carlyle had the same scorn of the multitude, the same belief in destiny, the same love of truth. Froude was more sceptical, less inclined to hero-worship, far more academic in thought and style. They agreed in setting the moral lessons of history above any theory of scientific development, and in cultivating the human interest of the narrative as that which alone abides.

— * Dr. Lightfoot. —

That Froude set out with a polemical purpose is not to be denied. He had seen enough of the Romanist or Anglican revival to dislike it heartily, and he held that Protestant countries were the most prosperous because they were morally the best. Although he did not accept the Evangelical theology, he thought Calvinism the most philosophic form of religious belief, and Puritanism the soundest sort of ethical creed. The Church of England as understood by his father was to him the healthiest of ecclesiastical institutions, teaching godliness, inculcating duty, saying as little as possible about dogma. Religion, he said, was meant to be obeyed, not to be examined. The sun was invaluable, unless you looked at it If you looked at it, you saw neither it nor anything else. But for the Reformation, England, like France, might be under a worthless despot sanctified by the Church, or, like Spain, be trampled under the feet of priests. The statutes of Henry VIII. were the title- deeds of the English Church. Henry established the supremacy of the State by letters patent, praemunire, and conge d'elire. The old bluebeard Henry, who spent his whole time in murdering his wives, was a nursery toy. The real Henry put two wives to death by lawful means on definite and substantial charges of which death was the penalty. His subjects were quite as anxious as he could be that he should have a male heir, and few now suppose that Anne Boleyn, or Katharine Howard, was faithful to her husband. The Church of Rome would have dethroned Henry and incited his subjects to rebellion. It was war to the knife, and the King won.

Froude regarded Henry's victory as the salvation of England. The dissolution of the monasteries was an incident in the struggle, necessary for the public interest, and justified by the evidence. Although part of their confiscated property was bestowed upon statesmen and courtiers, part went to found new Cathedral colleges, or grammar schools, and part to strengthen the national defences. Henry was a strange mixture, quite as much patriot as tyrant, and not safe enough on his throne to tolerate Popery. In Froude's view he stood for the nation. More and Fisher were for a foreign power. The time with which Froude chose to deal was full of blazing fire, which the ashes of three hundred years imperfectly covered. He did not realise the ordeal to which he was exposing himself, the malice he was stirring up. His whole life had been a preparation for the task. When he had the free run of his father's library after leaving Westminster, it was to the historical shelves that he went first; and while his brother talked eloquently about the evils of the Reformation, he himself was studying its causes. His own entanglement in the Anglican revival was personal, accidental, and brief. It was due entirely to his affectionate admiration for Newman, aided perhaps, if by anything, by curiosity to know something about the lives of the saints. For a real saint, such as Hugh of Lincoln, he had a sincere reverence, and loved to show it. The miraculous element disgusted him, and the more he read of ecclesiastical performances the more anti-ecclesiastical he became.

The article in The Edinburgh Review for July, 1858, upon Froude's first four volumes is an elaborate, an able, and a bitter attack. Henry Reeve, the editor of The Edinburgh at that time, and for many years afterwards, was not himself a scholar, like his illustrious predecessor, Cornewall Lewis. He was a Whig of the most conventional type, regarding Macaulay and Hallam as the ideal historians, suspicious of novelty, and dismayed by paradox. Froude's critic belonged to a more advanced school of Liberalism, and shuddered at the glorification of a "tyrant" like Henry VIII. That he had also some reason for personally detesting Froude is plain from his malicious references to the Lives of the Saints, and to The Nemesis of Faith, which Froude himself had, so far as he could, suppressed. When Froude's name was restored to the books of Exeter College in 1858, he wrote to Dr. Lightfoot, the Rector, that he regretted the publication both of The Nemesis and of Shadows of the Clouds. His object in future, he added, would be to defend the Church of England. That his idea of the Church was the same as Lightfoot's is improbable. Froude meant the Church of the Reformation, of private judgment, of an open Bible, of lay independence of bishop or priest. To that Church he was faithful, and he sympathised in sentiment, if he did not agree in dogma, with evangelical Christians. With Catholics, Roman or Anglican, he neither had nor pretended to have any sympathy at all. The Reformation is a convenient name for a complex European movement, difficult to describe, and almost impossible to define; but so far as it was English and constitutional, it is embodied in the legislation of Henry VIII., which substituted the supremacy of the Crown for the supremacy of the Pope. It was because Froude wrote avowedly in defence of that change that he incurred the bitter hostility of a powerful section in the English Church. He also irritated, partly perhaps because his tone betrayed the influence of Carlyle, a large body of Liberal opinion to which all despotism and persecution were obnoxious. The compliments, the reluctant compliments, of The Edinburgh reviewer must be taken as the admissions of an enemy. He acknowledges fully and frankly the thoroughness of Froude's research among the State Papers of the reign, not merely those printed and published by Robert Lemon, but "a large manuscript collection of copies of letters, minutes of council, theological tracts, parliamentary petitions, depositions upon trials, and miscellaneous communications upon the state of the country furnished by agents of the Government, all relating to the early years of the English Reformation." No historian has ever been more diligent than Froude was in reading and collating manuscripts. For Henry's reign alone he read and transcribed six hundred and eighty-seven pages in his small, close handwriting. That in so doing, and in working without assistance, he should sometimes fall into error was unavoidable. But he never spared himself. He was the most laborious of students, and his History was as difficult to write as it is easy to read. He had, as this hostile reviewer says, a "genuine love of historical research," and there is point in the same critic's complaint that his pages are "over-loaded with long quotations from State Papers."

What, then, it will be asked, was the real gist of the charges made against Froude by The Edinburgh Review? The question at issue was nothing less than the whole policy of Henry's reign, and the motives of the King. The character of Henry is one of the most puzzling in historical literature, and Froude had to deal with the most difficult part of it. To the virtues of his earlier days Erasmus is an unimpeachable witness. The power of his mind and the excellence of his education are beyond dispute. He held the Catholic faith, he was not naturally cruel, and, compared with Francis I., or with Henry of Navarre, he was not licentious. But he was brought up to believe that the ordinary rules of morality do not govern kings. That the king can do no wrong is now a maxim of the Constitution, and merely means that Ministers are responsible for the acts of the Crown. Henry could scarcely have been made to understand, even if there had been any one to tell him, what a constitutional monarch was. Though forced to admit, and taught by experience, that he could not safely tax his subjects without the formal sanction of Parliament, he was in theory absolute, and he held it his duty to rule as well as to reign. When Charles I. argued, a century later, that a king was not bound to keep faith with his subjects, it may be doubted whether he deceived himself. The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. His duty to God Henry would always have acknowledged. A historian so widely different from Froude as Bishop Stubbs has pointed out that, if mere self-indulgence had been the king's object, the infinite pains he took to obtain a Papal divorce from Katharine of Aragon would have been thrown away. That he had a duty to his neighbour, male or female, never entered his head. His subjects were his own, to deal with as he pleased. Revolting as this theory may seem now, it was held by most people then, and there was not a man in England, not Sir Thomas More himself, who would have told the King that it was untrue.

It is with the divorce of Katharine that the difficulty of estimating Henry begins. Froude's narrative sets out with the marriage of Anne Boleyn. Here the reviewer plants his first arrow. The divorce was a nullity, having no authority higher than Cranmer's. Anne Boleyn, as is likely enough from other causes, was never the King's wife, and Elizabeth was illegitimate, though she had of course a Parliamentary title to the throne. It seems clear, however, that inasmuch as Katharine had been his brother Prince Arthur's wife, the King could not lawfully marry her, according to the canons of the Catholic Church. Why did he marry Anne Boleyn? The reviewer says because he was in love with her, and triumphantly refers to the King's letters, printed in the Appendix of Hearne's Ayesbury.* They are undoubtedly love-letters, and they contain one indelicate expression. Compared with Mirabeau's letters to Sophie de Monnier, they are cold and chaste. Froude says that the King wanted a male heir, and he gives the same reason for the scandalously indecent haste with which Jane Seymour was married the day after Anne's execution. The character of Henry VIII. is only important now as it bears upon the policy of his reign. That Froude washed him too white is almost as certain as that Lingard painted him too black. The notion that lust supplies the key to his marriages and their consequences is utterly ridiculous. The most dissolute of English kings was content, and more than content, with one wife. On the other hand, Froude does at least give a clue when he suggests that these frequent marriages were political moves. A female sovereign reigning in her own right had never been known in England, and up to the birth of Jane Seymour's son Edward the whole kingdom passionately desired that there should be a Prince of Wales. Edward himself was but a sickly child, and was not expected to live even for the short span of his actual career. Credulous indeed must they be who maintain the innocence either of Anne Boleyn or of Katharine Howard, and there seems small use in holding with the learned Father Gasquet that Anne was not guilty of the offences imputed to her, but had done something too bad to be mentioned on a trial for incest. It is a question of evidence, and the evidence is lost. But the Grand Jury which presented Anne was respectable, the Court which convicted her was distinguished, and neither she nor any of her paramours denied their guilt on the scaffold. Simple adultery in a queen was capital then, if indeed it be not capital now. In an ordinary husband Henry's conduct would have been revolting. It is not attractive in him. Stubbs pleads that we cannot judge him, and abandons the attempt in despair.

— * Oxford, 1720. —

As he rejects with equal decision both the Roman Catholic picture and Froude's, he only puts us all to ignorance again. Froude is at least intelligible.

It is a fact, and not a fancy, that Henry provided from the spoils of the monasteries for the defence of the realm, that he founded new bishoprics from the same source, that he disarmed the ecclesiastical tribunals, and broke the bonds of Rome. The corruption of at least the smaller monasteries, some of which were suppressed by Wolsey before the rise of Cromwell, is established by the balance of evidence, and the disappearance of the Black Book which set forth their condition was only to be expected in the reign of Mary. The crime which weighs most upon the memory of the King is the execution of Fisher and More.

More, though he persecuted heretics, is the saint and philosopher of the age. Of Fisher Macaulay says that he was worthy to have lived in a better age, and died in a better cause. But what if these good men, from purely conscientious motives, would have brought over a Spanish army to coerce their Protestant fellow-subjects and their lawful sovereign? That, and not speculative error, is the real charge against them. Henry did all he could to put himself in the wrong. His atrocious request that More "would not use many words on the scaffold" makes one hate him after the lapse of well-nigh four hundred years. The question, however, is not one of personal feeling. Good men go wrong. Bad men are made by providence to be instruments for good. It is not More, nor Fisher, it is the Bluebeard of the children's history-books who gave England Miles Coverdale's Bible, who freed her from the yoke that oppressed France till the Revolution, and oppresses Spain to-day. Froude's first four volumes are an eloquent indictment of Ultramontanism, a plea for the Reformation, a sustained argument for English liberties and freedom of thought. No such book can be impartial in the sense of admitting that there is as much to be said on one side as on the other. Froude replied to The Edinburgh Review in Fraser's Magazine for September, 1858, and in the following month the reviewer retorted. He did not really shake the foundation of Froude's case, which was the same as Luther's. Luther, like Froude, was no democrat. To both of them the Reformation was a protest against ecclesiastical tyranny, or for spiritual freedom. "The comedy has ended in a marriage," said Erasmus of Luther and Luther's wife. It was not a comedy, and it had not ended.

Froude sometimes goes too far. When he defends the Boiling Act, under which human beings were actually boiled alive in Smithfield, he shakes confidence in his judgment. He sets too much value upon the verdicts of Henry's tribunals, forgetting Macaulay's emphatic declaration that State trials before 1688 were murder under the forms of law. Although the subject of his Prize Essay at Oxford was "The Influence of the Science of Political Economy upon the Moral and Social Welfare of a Nation," he never to the end of his life understood what political economy was. Misled by Carlyle, he conceived it to be a sort of "Gospel," a rival system to the Christian religion, instead of useful generalisations from the observed course of trade. He never got rid of the idea that Governments could fix the rate of wages and the price of goods. A more serious fault found by The Edinburgh reviewer, the ablest of all Froude's critics, was the implication rather than the assertion that Henry VIII.'s Parliaments represented the people. The House of Commons in the sixteenth century was really chosen through the Sheriffs by the Crown, and the preambles of the Statutes, upon which Froude relied as evidence of contemporary opinion, showed the opinion of the Government rather than the opinion of the people.

They are not of course on that account to be neglected. Although the House of Commons was no result of popular election, it consisted of representative Englishmen, who would hardly have acquiesced in statements notoriously untrue. Henry neither obtained nor asked the opinion of the people, as we understand the phrase. The "dim common populations" had no more to do with the Government of England then than they have to do with the Government of India now. At the same time it must be remembered that the King could not rely upon mere force. He had no standing army, and a popular rising would have swept him almost without resistance from his throne. It is almost as hard for us to imagine his position as to understand his character. Parliament, judges, magistrates, were subordinate to his sovereign will and pleasure. From the authority of the Pope he cut himself free, and neither Clement VII. nor Paul III. was strong enough to stand up against him. He could hold his own with France, with the Empire, with Spain. The one Power he never ventured to defy was the English people. It was the essence of the Tudor monarchy to rely upon the masses rather than the classes, to keep the aristocracy down by expressing the popular will. So far as Henry took part in it, the Reformation was not religious at all. As Macaulay drily remarks, he was a good Catholic who preferred to be his own Pope. He knew very well that Englishmen would like him none the worse for resisting the pretensions of Rome, for insisting on the royal supremacy, for taking every possible step to secure the succession in the male Tudor line. If in his callous indifference to the fate of the men or women who stood in his way he appears scarcely human, we must consider, with Bishop Stubbs, his awful isolation. The whole burden of the State was upon him, and he could not share it. Not till the reign of his elder daughter did his subjects realise the horrors from which he had delivered them.

Hostile criticism, though it affected the opinion of scholars, did Froude no harm with the public. Macaulay's popularity was at its height in 1858. But Macaulay passes lightly in his Introduction over the sixteenth century, and the reign of Henry VIII., or at least the latter part of it, had never been so copiously illustrated before. The Oxford Movement, which treated the Reformation as a discreditable incident worthy of oblivion, had not much influence with the laity. Nine Englishmen in ten were quite prepared to glorify the reformers, and were by no means sorry to find how much evidence there was for the good old English view of a Parliamentary Church. The Statutes of Supremacy and of Praemunire, even the execution of More and Fisher, reminded them that the Bishop of Rome neither had nor ought to have any jurisdiction within this realm of England. That "gospel light first dawned from Boleyn's eyes" might be a paradox. It was, however, a paradox which contained a truth, and it was by no means disagreeable to find that a popular king was not a mere monster of iniquity. If Henry had been what Catholic historians represented him, the mob would have pulled his palace about his ears. The public bought the book, and read it; for the style, though very unlike Macaulay's, was quite as easy to read. In 1860 appeared the two volumes dealing with Edward VI. And Mary, which complete the former half of this great book. After the brief and disturbed period of Edward's minority and Somerset's Protectorate, the country enjoyed a true Catholic reign. Whatever may have been the religion of Henry, there could be no doubt about Mary's. Mary had only one use for Protestants, and that was to burn them. Among her first victims were Latimer and Ridley, two bright ornaments of Christian faith and practice, who committed the deadly sin of believing that it was against the truth of Christ's natural body to be in heaven and earth at the same time. To them soon succeeded Cranmer, the father of the English liturgy, not a man of unblemished character, but incomparably superior to Gardiner, to Bonner, or to Pole. For Cranmer Froude had a peculiar affection, and his account of the Archbishop's martyrdom is unsurpassed by any other passage in the History. I need make no apology for quoting the end of it; "So perished Cranmer. He was brought out with the eyes of his soul blinded to make sport for his enemies, and in his death he brought upon them a wider destruction than he had effected by his teaching while alive. Pole was appointed next day to the See of Canterbury; but in other respects the Court had overreached themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept the recantation, they would have left the Archbishop to die broken- hearted, pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn, and the Reformation would have been disgraced in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they gave him an opportunity of redeeming his fame, and of writing his name in the roll of martyrs. The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a single and peculiar trial. The Apostle, though forewarned, denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the rock on which He would build His Church."

It used to be said of Ernest Renan that he was toniours seminariste, and there is a flavour of the pulpit in these beautiful sentences. Beautiful indeed they are, and not more beautiful than true. The implacable Mary, whose ghastly epithet clings to her for all time, like the shirt of Nessus, found in Pole an apt and zealous pupil in persecution. Both are excellent specimens of their Church, because according to that Church they are absolutely blameless. Punctilious in the discharge of all religious duties, they were chaste, sober, frugal, and honest. They made long prayers. They tithed mint, and anise, and cummin. They made clean the outside of the cup and platter. They firmly believed that they were pleasing the Deity they worshipped when they deluged England with blood. The spirit of the Marian martyrs is one of the noblest tributes to the power of true religion that the annals of Christendom contain. Henry' s victims were few and conspicuous. Their crime, or alleged crime, was treason. Mary's were obscure, and numbered by the hundred. Many of them were artisans and mechanics, who, as Burghley afterwards said, knew no faith except that they were called upon to abjure. They went to the stake without a murmur, sustained against the terrors of demonology by their own English hearts, by the love of their friends, and by the grace of God. Tennyson, in his play of Queen Mary, has put into the mouth of Pole some highly edifying sentiments on the want of true faith which prompts persecution. Pole's example was very different from these precepts. For the wretched Mary there may be some excuse; she was perhaps not wholly sane. Her fixed idea, that if she killed Protestants enough Heaven would give her a son, was the conviction of a lunatic. Her own husband fled from her, and left her with no earthly consolation save the stake. But Pole was sane enough when he burnt better Christians than himself. The true story of Mary's reign deserved to be told as Froude could tell it. The tale has two sides, and is a warning which has been taken to heart. Mary's subjects could not rebel. Her Spanish husband had behind him the military strength of a great Power. But never again, except during the brief and disastrous period which led to the expulsion of the second James, has England endured a Catholic sovereign. Neither her rulers nor her laws have always been just to Catholics. To tolerate intolerance, though a truly Christian lesson, is hard to learn. Mary Tudor and Reginald Pole taught the English people once for all what the triumph of Catholicism meant. So long as they are not supreme, Catholics are the best of subjects, of citizens, of neighbours, of friends. There is only one country in Europe where they are supreme now, and that country is Spain. They might have been supreme in England for at least a century if it had not been for the daughter of Katharine of Aragon and the Legate of Julius III.

Froude had now completed the first part of his great History. The second part, the reign of Elizabeth, was reserved for future issue in separately numbered volumes. The death of Macaulay in December, 1859, left Froude the most famous of living English historians, and the ugly duckling of the brood had become the glory of the family. The reception of his first six volumes was a curious one. The general public read, and admired. The few critics who were competent to form an instructed and impartial opinion perceived that, while there were errors in detail, the story of the English Reformation, and of the Catholic reaction which followed it, had been for the first time thoroughly told. Many years afterwards Froude said to Tennyson that the most essential quality in an historian was imagination. This true and profound remark is peculiarly liable to be misunderstood. People who do not know what imagination means are apt to confound it with invention, although the latter quality is really the last resort of those who are destitute of the former. Froude was an ardent lover of the truth, and desired nothing so much as to tell it. But it must be the truth as perceived by him, not as it might appear to others.* His readers are expected, if not to see with his eyes, at least to look from his point of view. Honestly believing that the Reformation was a great and beneficent fact in the progress of mankind, he was incapable of treating it as a sinful rebellion against the authority of the Church. Holding Henry VIII., with all his faults, to have been the champion of the laity against the clergy, of spiritual and intellectual freedom against the Roman yoke, he could not represent him as a monster of wickedness, trampling on morality for his own selfish ends. Doing full justice to the conscientiousness of Mary Tudor, excusing her more than some think she ought to be excused, he depicted the heroes of her bloody reign not only in Latimer and Ridley, but in the scores and hundreds of lowlier persons who died for the faith of Christ.

— * "Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth or error, but that anything is true to a man which he troweth? and not rather, as the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our moral as well as our intellectual being?"—Newman's Grammar of Assent, p. 311. —

Protestant as he was, however, Froude was an Englishman first and a Protestant afterwards. One might say of his history, as was said of the drama which Tennyson founded upon the fifth and sixth volumes, that the true heroine is the English people. Much of his popularity was due to his patriotism and his Protestantism. On the other hand he gave deep and lasting offence to High Churchmen, which they neither forgot nor forgave. They could not bear the spectacle of a Church established by statute, of the king in place of the Pope, of Cromwell and Cranmer justified, of More and Fisher condemned. While not unwilling to profit by Erastianism, they liked its origin kept out of sight. Bishops appointed by the Crown and sitting in the House of Lords, though awkward facts, were too familiar to be upsetting. The secular and Parliamentary origin of praemunire and conge d' elire were less notorious and more disagreeable subjects. They were indeed to be found in Hallam. But Hallam had not the popularity or the influence of Froude. Constitutional histories are for the learned classes. Froude wrote for men of the world. The consummate dexterity of his style was only observed by trained critics; its ease and grace were the unconscious delight of the humblest reader. Froude gave to the Protestant cause the same sort of distinction which Newman had given to the Oxford Movement. Newman's University sermons are neither learned nor profound. Yet the preacher's mastery of the English language in all its rich and manifold resources has, and must always have, an irresistible charm. The mantle of Newman had fallen on Froude, and Froude had also the indefatigable diligence of the born historian. None of his mistakes were due to carelessness. They proceeded rather from the multitude of the documents he studied and the self-reliance which led him to dispense with all external aid. He had of course friendly reviewers, such as William Bodham Donne; afterwards Examiner of Plays, in Fraser, and Charles Kingsley in Macmillan. Kingsley, however, though Lord Palmerston made him Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, was not altogether the best ally for an historian. It was in defending Froude that Kingsley made his unfortunate attack upon Newman, which led to his own discomfiture in the first Preface to the Apologia. Froude was unable to support his champion's irrelevant and unlucky onslaught. Newman's casuistry was a fair subject for criticism; his personal integrity should have been above suspicion, and Kingsley's insinuations against it only recoiled upon himself. No one, as his History shows, could do ampler justice to individual Catholics than Froude, and his feelings for Newman were never altered, either by disagreement or by time.

The first part of the History had just been finished when a sudden bereavement altered the whole course of Froude's life. On the 21st of April, 1860, Mrs. Froude died. Her religious opinions had been very different from her husband's. She had always leant towards the Church of Rome, though after her marriage she did not conform to it. He was probably under Mrs. Froude's influence when he wrote his Essay on the Philosophy of Catholicism in 1851, reprinted in the first series of Short Studies, which does not strike one as at all characteristic of him, and is certainly quite different from his noble discourse on the Book of Job, published two years later. Mrs. Froude never cared for London, and had always lived in the country. After her death Froude took for the first time a London house, and settled himself with his children in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park.

Later in the same year died his publisher, John Parker the younger, of a painful and distressing illness, through which Froude nursed him with tender affection. The elder Parker kept on the business, and brought out the remaining volumes of Froude's History. His son had been editor of Fraser's Magazine, and in that position Froude succeeded him at the beginning of 1861. He thus found a regular occupation besides his History. Fraser had a high literary reputation, and among its regular contributors was John Skelton, writing under the name of "Shirley," who became one of Froude's most intimate friends. In the Table Talk of Shirley* are some interesting extracts from Froude's letters, as well as a very vivid description of Froude himself. On the 12th of January, when he was only just installed, Froude began a correspondence kept up for thirty years by a brief note about Thelatta, a political romance by Skelton, with an odd, mixed portrait of Canning and Disraeli, very pleasant to read, but now almost, I do not know why, neglected.

— * Blackwood, 1895. —

Froude is hardly just to it. "I have read Thalatta," he writes, "and now what shall I say? for it is so charming, and it might be so much more charming. There is no mistake about its value. The yacht scene made me groan over the recollections of days and occupations exactly the same. To wander round the world in a hundred tons schooner would be my highest realisation of human felicity." Even the name of the book must have appealed to Froude. For more than almost any other man of letters he loved the sea. Yachting was his passion. He pursued it in youth despite of qualms, and in later life they disappeared. Constitutionally fearless, and an excellent sailor, a voyage was to him the best of holidays, invigorating the body and refreshing the brain.

Froude was already at work on the reign of Elizabeth, and in March, 1861, he went to Spain for two months. This was the occasion of his earliest visit to Simancas, where he was allowed free access to the diplomatic correspondence and other records there collected and kept. The advantage to Froude of these documents, especially the despatches from the Spanish Ambassadors in London to the Government at Madrid, was enormous, and it is from them that the last volumes of the History derive their peculiar value. He used his opportunities to the utmost, and his bulky, voluminous transcripts may be seen at the British Museum. His plan was to take rooms at Valladolid, from which he drove to Simancas, a wretched little village, and worked for the day. The unpublished materials which he found at his disposal were such as scarcely any historian had ever enjoyed before.

A few months after his return to England, on the 12th of September, 1861, he married his second wife, Henrietta Warre. Miss Warre, who had been his first wife's intimate friend, was exactly suited to him, and their union was one of perfect happiness. So long as he was editor of Fraser, Froude felt it his duty to write pretty regularly for it, so that his hands were constantly full. But of course his main business for the next ten years was the continuation of his History, which involved frequent visits to Simancas, as well as many to the British Museum, the Record Office, and Hatfield House.

From the Marquess of Salisbury, father of the late Prime Minister, Froude received permission to search the Cecil papers at Hatfield, which, though less numerous than those in the Record Office, are invaluable to students of Elizabeth's reign. His investigations at Hatfield were begun in April, 1862, and led, among other consequences, to one of his most valued friendships. With Lady Salisbury, afterwards Lady Derby, he kept up for more than thirty years a correspondence which only ended with his death. It was Froude who introduced Lady Salisbury to Carlyle, and she thoroughly appreciated the genius of both. Her intimate knowledge of politics was completed when Lord Derby sat in Disraeli's Cabinet. But she was always behind the scenes, and it was from her that Froude obtained most of his political information. Their earliest communications, however, referred to the Elizabethan part of the History, especially to the career and influence of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. A preliminary letter shows the thoroughness of Froude's methods. The date is the 5th of March, 1862.

"DEAR LADY SALISBURY,—If Lord Salisbury has not repented of his kind promise to me, I shall in a few weeks be in a condition to avail myself of it, and I write to ask you whether about the beginning of next month I may be permitted to examine the papers at Hatfield. I am unwilling to trouble Lord Salisbury more than necessary. I have therefore examined every other collection within my reach first, that I might know clearly what I wanted. Obliged as I am to confine myself for the present to the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign, there will not be much which I shall have to examine there, the great bulk of Lord Burleigh's papers for that time being in the Record Office—but if I can be allowed a few days' work, I believe I can turn them to good account. With my very best thanks for your own and Salisbury's goodness in this matter, I remain, faithfully yours,

"J. A. FROUDE."

A few days later he writes: "I have seen Stewart and looked through the catalogue. There appear to be about eight volumes which I wish to examine. The volumes which I marked as containing matter at present important to me are Vols. 2 and 3 on the war with France and Scotland from 1559 to 1563, Vols. 138, 152, 153, 154, 155 on the disputes relating to the succession to the English Crown, and the respective claims of the Queen of Scots, Lady Catherine Grey, Lord Darnley, and Laqy Margaret Lennox. I noted the volumes only. I did not take notice of the pages because as far as I could see the volumes appeared to be given up to special subjects, and I should wish therefore to read them through."

His growing admiration for Cecil appears in the following extracts:

"I could only do real justice to such a collection by being allowed to read through the whole of it volume by volume—and for such a large permission as that I fear it may be dangerous to ask. Lord Salisbury, however, whatever my faults may be, could find no one who has a more genuine admiration for his ancestor."

October 16th, 1864.—"I cannot say beforehand the papers which I wish to examine, as I cannot tell what the collection may contain. My object is to have everything which admits of being learnt about the period—especially what may throw light on Lord Burleigh's character. He, it is more and more clear to me, was the solitary author of Elizabeth's and England's greatness."

"I shall return from Simancas," he writes from Valladolid, "more a Cecil maniac than ever. In the Duke of Norfolk's conspiracy, the Queen seems to have fairly given up the reins to him. It is impossible to read the correspondence between Philip, Alva, the Pope, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Queen of Scots, the deliberate arrangements for Elizabeth's murder, without shivering to think how near a chance it was. Cecil was the one only man they feared, and the skill with which he dug mines below theirs, and pulled the strings of the whole of Europe against them, was truly splendid. Elizabeth had lost her head with it all, but she knew it and did not interfere. There are a great many letters of the Queen of Scots at Simancas, some of them of the deepest interest. She remains the same as I have always thought her—brilliant, cruel, ruthless, and perfectly unfeeling."

Although Froude's admiration for Elizabeth steadily diminished with the progress of his researches, even students of his History will be surprised by such a verdict as this:

"I am slowly drawing to the end of my long journey through the Records. By far the largest part of Burghley's papers is here [in the Record Office], and not at Hatfield. The private letters which passed between him and Walsingham about Elizabeth have destroyed finally the prejudice that still clung to me that, notwithstanding her many faults, she was a woman of ability. Evidently in their opinion she had no ability at all worth calling by the name."

Two or three extracts will complete the part of this correspondence which deals with the composition of the History. "I have been incessantly busy in the Record Office since my return to London. The more completely I examine the MSS. elsewhere the better use I shall be able to make of yours. I have still two months of this kind before me, and my intention, if you did not yourself write to me first, was to ask you to let me go to Hatfield for a week or two about Easter."

"I am now sufficiently master of the story to be able to make very good (I daresay complete) use of the Hatfield papers in my present condition. I feel as if there were very few dark places left in Queen Elizabeth's proceedings anywhere. I substantially end, in a blaze of fireworks, with the Armada. The concentrated interest of the reign lies in the period now under my hands. It is all action, and I shall use my materials badly if I cannot make it as interesting as a novel."

Nothing was neglected by Froude which could throw light upon the splendid and illustrious Queen who raised England from the depths of degradation to the height of renown. It was at the zenith of Elizabeth's career that Froude stopped. His original intention had been to continue till her death. But the ample scale on which he had planned his book was so much enlarged by his copious quotations from the manuscripts at Simancas that by the time he reached his eleventh volume he substituted for the death of Elizabeth on his title-page the defeat of the Armada. With the year 1588, then, he closed his labours. Even the perverse critics who had assumed to treat the History of Henry VIII. as an anti-ecclesiastical pamphlet were compelled to show more respect for volumes which gave so much novel information to the world. Moreover Henry's daughter was a very different person from her father. Scandal about Queen Elizabeth had been chiefly confined to Roman Catholics, and few Englishmen had forgotten who made England the mistress of the seas. The old religion had a strong fascination for her, and every one knows how she interrupted Dean Nowell when he preached against images. She declined to be the head of the Church in the sense arrogated by Henry, and yet she would by no means admit the supremacy of the Pope. If she ever felt any inclination towards Rome, the massacre of St. Bartholomew checked it for ever. Gregory XIII. and Catherine de Medici were rulers to her taste. On the other hand she resisted the persecuting tendencies of her Bishops, and spared the life even of such a wretch as Bonner. It is possible that she believed in transubstantiation. It is certain that she objected to the marriage of the clergy, and showed scant courtesy to the wife of her own favourite Archbishop Parker. Nor would she suffer the Bishops, except as Peers, to meddle in affairs of State. A magnificent princess, every inch a queen, she could not forget that the English people had saved her life from the clutches of her sister, and it was for them, not for any Minister, courtier, or lover, that she really cared.

Froude was no idolater of Elizabeth, and he became more unfavourable to her as he proceeded. He dwells minutely upon all her intrigues, in which she was as petty as in great matters she was grand. For her rival, Mary Stuart, he had neither respect nor mercy. To her intellect indeed, which was quite on a par with Elizabeth's, he does full justice. But neither her beauty nor her wit, neither her scholarship nor her statesmanship, neither her passion nor her courage, could blind him to her selfishness, her immorality, and the fact that she represented the Catholic cause. His account of her execution certainly lacks sentiment, and Mrs. Norton accused him of writing like a disappointed lover. His sympathies are with John Knox, and the Regent Murray, and Maitland of Lethington. But the man who believes that Mary was not concerned in the murder of her husband will believe anything, even that she did not reward the murderer of her brother, or that she would have spared Elizabeth if Elizabeth had been in her power. And at least Froude does not, like some more modern writers, degrade her to the level of a kitchen wench. Froude's Elizabeth was the subject of bitter, hostile, sometimes violent, criticism in The Saturday Review, the property of an ardent High Churchman, Beresford Hope. In the next chapter I shall deal with these articles at more length. It is enough to say here that they were directed not merely at Froude's accuracy as an historian, but at his truthfulness as a man, suggesting that the mode in which he had manipulated authorities accessible to every one threw grave doubts upon his version of what he read at Simancas. Froude knew very well that he should make enemies. His belief that history had been cericalised, and required to be laicised, was regarded as peculiarly offensive in one who had been himself ordained.

Mary Stuart, moreover, had stalwart champions beyond the border who were neither clerical nor ecclesiastical. "I fear," Froude wrote on the 22nd of May, 1862, to his Scottish friend Skelton, who was himself much interested in the subject—"I fear my book will bring all your people about my ears. Mary Stuart, from my point of view, was something between Rachel and a pantheress."

The success of the History had been long since assured, and each successive pair of volumes met with a cordial welcome. Many people disagreed with Froude on many points. He expected disagreement, and did not mind it. But no one could fail to see the evidence of patient, thorough research which every chapter, almost every page, contains. Indeed, it might be said with justice, or at least with some plausibility, that the long and frequent extracts from the despatches of De Feria, de Quadra, de Silva, and Don Guereau, successively Ambassadors from Philip to Elizabeth, water-log the book, and make it too like a series of extracts with explanatory comments. Of Froude's own style there could not be two opinions. His bitterest antagonists were forced to admit that it was the perfection of easy, graceful narrative, without the majestic splendour of Gibbon, but also without the mechanical hardness of Macaulay. Froude did not stop deliberately, as other historians have stopped, to paint pictures or draw portraits, and there are few writers from whom it is more difficult to make typical or characteristic extracts. Yet, as I have already quoted from his account of Cranmer's execution, it may not be inappropriate that I should cite some of the thoughts suggested to him by the death of Knox. Morton's epitaph is well known.

"There lies one," said the Earl over the coffin, "who never feared the face of mortal man." "Morton," says Froude, "spoke only of what he knew; the full measure of Knox's greatness neither he nor any man could then estimate. It is as we look back over that stormy time, and weigh the actors in it one against the other, that he stands out in his full proportions. No grander figure can be found, in the entire history of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox. Cromwell and Burghley rank beside him for the work which they effected, but, as politicians and statesmen, they had to labour with instruments which soiled their hands in touching them. In purity, in uprightness, in courage, truth and stainless honour, the Regent and Latimer were perhaps his equals; but Murray was intellectually far below him and the sphere of Latimer's influence was on a smaller scale. The time has come when English history may do justice to one but for whom the Reformation would have been overthrown among ourselves; for the spirit which Knox created saved Scotland; and if Scotland had been Catholic again, neither the wisdom of Elizabeth's Ministers, nor the teaching of her Bishops, nor her own chicaneries, would have preserved England from revolution. His was the voice that taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was the one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was who had raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious and fanatical, but who nevertheless were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could force again to submit to tyranny. And his reward has been the ingratitude of those who should have done most honour to his memory."

The spirit of this fine passage may be due to the great Scotsman with whom Froude's name will always be inseparably associated. But Froude knew the subject as Carlyle did not pretend to know it, and his verdict is as authoritative as it is just. It is knowledge, even more than brilliancy, that these twelve volumes evince. Froude had mastered the sixteenth century as Macaulay mastered the seventeenth, with the same minute, patient industry. When he came to write he wrote with such apparent facility that those who did not know the meaning of historical research thought him shallow and superficial.

The period during which Froude was studying the reign of Elizabeth must be pronounced the happiest of his life. He was a born historian, and loved research. He had opportunities of acquiring knowledge opened to no one before, and it concerned those events which above all others attracted him. His second wife was the most sympathetic of companions, thoroughly understanding all his moods. She was fond of society, and induced him to frequent it. Froude was disinclined to go out in the evening, and would, if he had been left to himself, have stayed at home. He wrote to Lady Salisbury: "I must trust to your kindness to make allowance for my old-fashioned ways. I am so much engaged in the week that I give my Sunday evenings to my children, and never go out." But when he was in company he talked better than almost any one else, and he had a magnetic power of fascination which men as well as women often found quite irresistible. Living in London, he saw people of all sorts, and the puritan sternness which lay at the root of his character was concealed by the cynical humour which gave zest to his conversation. He had not forgotten his native county, and in 1863 he took a house at Salcombe on the southern coast of Devonshire. Ringrone, which he rented from Lord Kingsale, is a beautiful spot, now a hotel, then remote from railways, and an ideal refuge for a student. "We have a sea like the Mediterranean," he tells Skelton, "and estuaries beautiful as Loch Fyne, the green water washing our garden wall, and boats and mackerel." Froude worked there, however, besides yachting, fishing, and shooting.

In 1864, for instance, he "floundered all the summer among the extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics—the most damnable set of pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark." His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of the finest in England. Froude loved Devonshire folk, and enjoyed talking to them in their own dialect, or smoking with them on the shore. He was particularly fond of the indignant expostulation of a poor woman whose husband had been injured by his own chopper, and obliged in consequence to keep his bed. If, she said, it had been "a visitation of Providence, or the like of that there," he would have borne it patiently. "But to come upon a man in the wood-house" was not in the fitness of things. Froude's favourite places of worship in London were Westminster Abbey during Dean Stanley's time, and afterwards the Temple Church, as may be gathered from his Short Study on the Templars. In Devonshire he frequented an old-fashioned church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard. "Who is the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the King of glory."

As an editor Froude was tolerant and catholic. "On controverted points," he said, "I approve myself of the practice of the Reformation. When St. Paul's Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be pulled up before the same audience for what they might say." His own literary judgments were rather conventional. The mixture of classes in Clough's Bothie disturbed him. The genius of Matthew Arnold he had recognised at once, but then Arnold was a classical, academic poet. About Tennyson he agreed with the rest of the world, while Tennyson, who was a personal friend, paid him the great compliment of taking from him the subject of a poem and the material of a play. His prejudice against Browning's style, much as he liked Browning himself, was hard to overcome, and on this point he had a serious difference with his friend Skelton. "Browning's verse!" he exclaims. "With intellect, thought, power, grace, all the charms in detail which poetry should have, it rings after all like a bell of lead." This was in 1863, when Browning had published Men and Women, and Dramatic Lyrics. However, he admitted Skelton's article on the other side, and added, with magnificent candour, that "to this generation Browning's poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare's Sonnets were to the last century." The most fervent Browningite could have said no more than that. To Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads Froude was conspicuously fair. There was much in them which offended his Puritanism, but he was disgusted with the virulence of the critics, and he allowed Skelton to write in Fraser a qualified apology.