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The Life of Froude

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Title: The Life of Froude

Author: Herbert W. Paul


        
Release date: February 9, 2005 [eBook #14992]
                Most recently updated: December 19, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14992

Credits: Produced by Michael Madden


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE OF FROUDE ***




Produced by Michael Madden





The Life of Froude

By Herbert Paul

London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1905.


PREFACE

Although eleven years have elapsed since Mr. Froude's death, no
biography of him has, so far as I know, appeared. This book is an
attempt to tell the public something about a man whose writings have
a permanent place in the literature of England.

It is a pleasure to acknowledge my obligation to Miss Margaret
Froude for having allowed me the use of such written material as
existed. A large number of Mr. Froude's letters were destroyed after
his death, and it was not intended by the family that any biography
of him should be written. Finding that I was engaged upon the task,
Miss Froude supplied those facts, dates, and papers which were
essential to the accuracy of the narrative. Mr. Froude's niece, Mrs.
St. Leger Harrison, known to the world as Lucas Malet, has allowed
me to use some of her uncle's letters to her mother.

Lady Margaret Cecil has, with great kindness, permitted me to make
copious extracts from Mr. Froude's letters to her mother, the late
Countess of Derby. I must also express my gratitude to Sir Thomas
Sanderson, Lord Derby's executor, to Cardinal Newman's literary
representative Mr. Edward Bellasis, and to Mr. Arthur Clough, son of
Froude's early friend the poet.

Mr. James Rye, of Balliol College, Oxford, placed at my disposal,
with singular generosity, the results of his careful examination
into the charges made against Mr. Froude by Mr. Freeman.

The Rector of Exeter was good enough to show me the entries in the
college books bearing upon Mr. Froude's resignation of his
Fellowship, and to tell me everything he knew on the subject.

My indebtedness to the late Sir John Skelton's delightful book,
The Table Talk of Shirley, will be obvious to my readers.

I have, in conclusion, to thank my old friend Mr. Birrell, for
lending me his very rare copy of the funeral sermon preached by
Mr. Froude at Torquay.

October 30, 1905.


CHAPTER I

CHILDHOOD

IN reading biographies I always skip the genealogical details. To
be born obscure and to die famous has been described as the acme of
human felicity. However that may be, whether fame has anything to do
with happiness or no, it is a man himself, and not his ancestors,
whose life deserves, if it does deserve, to be written. Such was
Froude's own opinion, and it is the opinion of most sensible people.
Few, indeed, are the families which contain more than one remarkable
figure, and this is the rock upon which the hereditary principle
always in practice breaks. For human lineage is not subject to the
scientific tests which alone could give it solid value as positive
or negative evidence. There is nothing to show from what source,
other than the ultimate source of every good and perfect gift,
Froude derived his brilliant and splendid powers. He was a gentleman,
and he did not care to find or make for himself a pedigree. He knew
that the Froudes had been settled in Devonshire time out of mind as
yeomen with small estates, and that one of them, to whom his own
father always referred with contempt, had bought from the Heralds'
College what Gibbon calls the most useless of all coats, a coat
of arms. Froude's grandfather did a more sensible thing by marrying
an heiress, a Devonshire heiress, Miss Hurrell, and thereby doubling
his possessions. Although he died before he was five-and-twenty, he
left four children behind him, and his only son was the
historian's father.

James Anthony Froude, known as Anthony to those who called him by
his Christian name, was born at Dartington, two miles from Totnes,
on St. George's Day, Shakespeare's birthday, the 23rd of April,
1818. His father, who had taken a pass degree at Oxford, and had
then taken orders, was by that time Rector of Dartington and
Archdeacon of Totnes. Archdeacon Froude belonged to a type of
clergyman now almost extinct in the Church of England, though with
strong idiosyncrasies of his own. Orthodox without being spiritual,
he was a landowner as well as a parson, a high and dry Churchman, an
active magistrate, a zealous Tory, with a solid and unclerical
income of two or three thousand a year. He was a personage in the
county, as well as a dignitary of the Church. Every one in Devonshire
knew the name of Froude, if only from "Parson Froude," no
credit to his cloth, who appears as Parson Chowne in Blackmore's
once popular novel, The Maid of Sker. But the Archdeacon was a man
of blameless life, and not in the least like Parson Froude. A hard
rider and passionately fond of hunting, he was a good judge of a
horse and usually the best mounted man in the field. One of his
exploits as an undergraduate was to jump the turnpike gate on the
Abingdon road with pennies under his seat, between his knees and the
saddle, and between his feet and the stirrups, without dropping one.

Although he had been rather extravagant and something of a dandy, he
was able to say that he could account for every sixpence he spent
after the age of twenty-one. On leaving Oxford he settled down to
the life of a country parson with conscientious thoroughness, and
was reputed the best magistrate in the South Hams. Farming his own
glebe, as he did, with skill and knowledge, perpetually occupied, as
he was, with clerical or secular business, he found the Church of
England, not then disturbed by any wave of enthusiasm, at once
necessary and sufficient to his religious sense. His horror of
Nonconformists was such that he would not have a copy of The
Pilgrim's Progress in his house. He upheld the Bishop and all
established institutions, believing that the way to heaven was to
turn to the right and go straight on. There were many such
clergymen in his day.

In appearance he was a cold, hard, stern man, despising sentiment,
reticent and self-restrained. But beneath the surface there lay deep
emotions and an aesthetic sense, of which his drawings were the only
outward sign. To these sketches he himself attached no value. "You
can buy better at the nearest shop for sixpence," he would say, if
he heard them praised. Yet good judges of art compared them with the
early sketches of Turner, and Ruskin afterwards gave them
enthusiastic praise. Mr. Froude had married, when quite a young man,
Margaret Spedding, the daughter of an old college friend, from
Armathwaite in Cumberland. Her nephew is known as the prince of
Baconian scholars and the J. S. of Tennyson's poem. She was a woman
of great beauty, deeply religious, belonging to a family more
strongly given to letters and to science than the Froudes, whose
tastes were rather for the active life of sport and adventure. One
can imagine the Froudes of the sixteenth century manning the ships
of Queen Bess and sailing with Frobisher or Drake. For many years
Mrs. Froude was the mistress of a happy home, the mother of many
handsome sons and fair daughters. The two eldest, Hurrell and
Robert, were especially striking, brilliant lads, popular at Eton,
their father's companions in the hunting-field or on the moors. But
in Dartington Rectory, with all its outward signs of prosperity and
welfare, there were the seeds of death. Before Anthony Froude, the
youngest of eight, was three years old, his mother died of a
decline, and within a few years the same illness proved fatal to
five of her children. The whole aspect of life at Dartington was
changed. The Archdeacon retired into himself and nursed his grief in
silence, melancholy, isolated, austere.

This irreparable calamity was made by circumstances doubly
calamitous. Though destined to survive all his brothers and sisters,
Anthony was a weak, sickly child, not considered never heard the
mention of his mother's name, or was the Archdeacon himself capable
of showing any tenderness whatever. In place of a mother the little
boy had an aunt, who applied to him principles of Spartan severity.
At the mature age of three he was ducked every morning at a trough,
to harden him, in the ice-cold water from a spring, and whenever he
was naughty he was whipped. It may have been from this unpleasant
discipline that he derived the contempt for self-indulgence, and the
indifference to pain, which distinguished him in after life. On the
other hand, he was allowed to read what he liked, and devoured
Grimm's Tales, The Seven Champions of Christendom, and The Arabian
Nights. He was an imaginative and reflective child, full of the
wonder in which philosophy begins.

The boy felt from the first the romantic beauty of his home.
Dartington Rectory, some two miles from Totnes, is surrounded by
woods which overhang precipitously the clear waters of the River
Dart. Dartington Hall, which stood near the rectory, is one of the
oldest houses in England, originally built before the Conquest, and
completed with great magnificence in the reign of Richard II. The
vast banqueting-room was, in the nineteenth century, a ruin, and
open to the sky. The remains of the old quadrangle were a treasure
to local antiquaries, and the whole place was full of charm for an
imaginative boy. Mr. Champernowne, the owner, was an intimate friend
of the Archdeacon, to whom he left the guardianship of his children,
so that the Froudes were as much at home in their squire's house as
in the parsonage itself. Although most of his brothers and sisters
were too old to be his companions, the group in which his first
years were passed was an unusually spirited and vivacious one.
Newman, who was one of Hurrell's visitors from Oxford, has described
the young girls "blooming and in high spirits," full of gaiety and charm.*

--
* Newman's Letters and Correspondence, ii. 73.
--

The Froudes were a remarkable family. They had strong characters
and decided tastes, but they had not their father's conventionality
and preference for the high roads of life. They were devoted to sport,
and at the same time abounded in mental vigour. All the brothers had
the gift of drawing. John, though forced into a lawyer's office,
would if left to himself have become an artist by profession. The
nearest to Anthony in age was William, afterwards widely celebrated
as a naval engineer. Then came Robert, the most attractive of the
boys. A splendid athlete, compared by Anthony with a Greek statue,
he had sweetness as well as depth of nature. His drawings of horses
were the delight of his family; and when his favourite hunter died
he wrote a graceful elegy on the afflicting event. The influence of
his genial kindness was never forgotten by his youngest brother; but
there was a stronger and more dominating personality of which the
effect was less beneficial to a sensitive and nervous child.

Richard Hurrell Froude is regarded by High Churchmen as an
originator of the Oxford Movement, and he impressed all his
contemporaries by the brilliancy of his gifts. Dean Church went so
far as to compare him with Pascal. But his ideas of bringing up
children were naturally crude, and his treatment of Anthony was more
harsh than wise. His early character as seen at home is described by
his mother in a letter written a year before her death, when he was
seventeen. Fond as she was of him and proud of his brilliant
promise, she did not know what to make of him, so wayward was he and
inconsiderately selfish. "I am in a wretched state of health," the
poor lady explained, "and quiet is important to my recovery and
quite essential to my comfort, yet he disturbs it for what he calls
'funny tormenting,' without the slightest feeling, twenty times a
day. At one time he kept one of his brothers screaming, from a sort
of teasing play, for near an hour under my window. At another he
acted a wolf to his baby brother, whom he had promised never to
frighten again."*

--
* Guiney's Hurrell Froude, p. 8.
--

Anthony was the baby brother, and though this form of teasing was
soon given up, the temper which dictated it remained. Hurrell, it
should be said, inflicted severe discipline upon himself to curb his
own refractory nature. In applying the same to his little brother he
showed that he did not understand the difference between Anthony's
character and his own. But lack of insight and want of sympathy were
among Hurrell's acknowledged defects.

Conceiving that the child wanted spirit, Hurrell once took him up by
the heels, and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom of a
stream. Another time he threw him into deep water out of a boat to
make him manly. But he was not satisfied by inspiring physical
terror. Invoking the aid of the preternatural, he taught his brother
that the hollow behind the house was haunted by a monstrous and
malevolent phantom, to which, in the plenitude of his imagination,
he gave the name of Peningre. Gradually the child discovered that
Peningre was an illusion, and began to suspect that other ideas of
Hurrell's might be illusions too. Superstition is the parent of
scepticism from the cradle to the gave. At the same time his own
faculty of invention was rather stimulated than repressed. He was
encouraged in telling, as children will, imaginative stories of
things which never occurred.

In spite of ghosts and muddy water Anthony worshipped Hurrell, a
born leader of men, who had a fascination for his brothers and
sisters, though not perhaps of the most wholesome kind. The
Archdeacon himself had no crotchets. He was a religious man, to whom
religion meant duty rather than dogma, a light to the feet, and a
lantern for the path. A Tory and a Churchman, he was yet a moderate
Tory and a moderate Churchman; prudent, sensible, a man of the
world. To Hurrell Dissenters were rogues and idiots, a Liberal was
half an infidel, a Radical was, at least in intention, a thief. From
the effect of this nonsense Anthony was saved for a time by his
first school. At the age of nine he was sent to Buckfastleigh, five
miles up the River Dart, where Mr. Lowndes, the rector and patron of
the living, took boarders and taught them, mostly Devonshire boys.
Buckfastleigh was not a bad school for the period. There was plenty
of caning, but no bullying, and Latin was well taught. Froude was a
gentle, amiable child, "such a very good-tempered little fellow
that, in spite of his sawneyness, he is sure to be liked," as his
eldest brother wrote in 1828. He suffered at this time from an
internal weakness, which made games impossible. His passion, which
he never lost, was for Greek, and especially for Homer. With a
precocity which Mill or Macaulay might have envied, he had read both
the Iliad and the Odyssey twice before he was eleven. The standard
of accuracy at Buckfastleigh was not high, and Froude's scholarship
was inexact. What he learnt there was to enjoy Homer, to feel on
friendly terms with the Greeks and Trojans, at ease with the
everlasting wanderer in the best story-book composed by man.
Anthony's holidays were not altogether happy. He was made to work
instead of amusing himself, and forced into an unwholesome
precocity. Then at eleven he was sent to Westminster.

In 1830 the reputation of Westminster stood high. The boarding-
houses were well managed, the lagging in them was light, and their
tone was good. Unhappily, in spite of the head master's
remonstrances, Froude's father, who had spent a great deal of money
on his other sons' education, insisted on placing him in college,
which was then far too rough for a boy of his age and strength. On
account of what he had read, rather than what he had learnt, at
Buckfastleigh, he took a very high place, and was put with boys far
older than himself. The lagging was excessively severe. The bullying
was gross and unchecked. The sanitary accommodation was abominable.
The language of the dormitory was indecent and profane. Froude,
whose health prevented him from the effective use of nature's
weapons, was woke by the hot points of cigars burning holes in his
face, made drunk by being forced to swallow brandy punch, and
repeatedly thrashed. He was also more than half starved, because the
big fellows had the pick of the joints at dinner, and left the small
fellows little besides the bone. Ox-tail soup at the pastrycook's
took the place of a meal which the authorities were bound to
provide. Scandalous as all this may have been, it was not peculiar
to Westminster. The state of college at Winchester, and at Eton, was
in many respects as bad. Public schools had not yet felt the
influence of Arnold and of the reforming spirit. Head masters
considered domestic details beneath them, and parents, if they felt
any responsibility at all, persuaded themselves that boys were all
the better for roughing it as a preparation for the discipline of
the world. The case of Froude, however, was a peculiarly bad one. He
was suffering from hernia, and the treatment might well have killed
him. Although his lagging only lasted for a year, he was
persistently bullied and tormented, until he forgot what he had
learned, instead of adding to it. When the body is starved and ill-
treated, the mind will not work. The head master, Dr. Williamson,
was disappointed in a boy of whom he had expected so much, and wrote
unfavourable reports. After enduring undeserved and disabling
hardships for three years and a half, Froude was taken away from
Westminster at the age of fifteen.

To escape from such a den of horrors was at first a relief. But he
soon found that his miseries were not over. He came home in
disgrace. His misfortunes were regarded as his faults, and the worst
construction was put upon everything he said or did. His clothes and
books had been freely stolen in the big, unregulated dormitory. He
was accused of having pawned them, and his denials were not
believed. If he had had a mother, all might have been well, for no
woman with a heart would assume that her child was lying. The
Archdeacon, without a particle of evidence, assumed it at once, and
beat the wretched boy severely in the presence of the approving
Hurrell. Hurrell would have made an excellent inquisitor. His
brother always spoke of him as peculiarly gifted in mind and in
character; but he knew little of human nature, and he doubtless
fancied that in torturing Anthony's body he was helping Anthony's
soul. To alter two words in the fierce couplet of the satirist,

He said his duty, both to man and God,
Required such conduct, which seemed very odd.

Anthony was threatened, in the true inquisitorial spirit, with a
 series of floggings, until he should confess what he had not done.
At last, however, he was set down as incorrigibly stupid, and given
up as a bad job. The Archdeacon arrived at the conclusion that his
youngest son was a fool, and might as well be apprenticed to a
tanner. Having hoped that he would be off his hands as a student of
Christ Church at sixteen, he was bitterly disappointed, and took no
pains to conceal his disappointment.

To Anthony himself it seemed a matter of indifference what became of
him, and a hopeless mystery why he had been brought into the world.
He had no friend. The consumption in the family was the boy's only
hope. His mother had died of it, and his brother Robert, who had
been kind to him, and taught him to ride. It was already showing
itself in Hurrell. His own time could not, he thought, be long.
Meanwhile, he was subjected to petty humiliations, in which the
inventive genius of Hurrell may be traced. He was not, for instance,
permitted to have clothes from a tailor. Old garments were found in
the house, and made up for him in uncouth shapes by a woman in the
village. His father seldom spoke to him, and never said a kind word
to him. By way of keeping him quiet, he was set to copy out Barrow's
sermons. It is difficult to understand how the sternest
disciplinarian, being human, could have treated his own motherless
boy with such severity. The Archdeacon acted, no doubt, upon a
theory, the theory that sternness to children is the truest kindness
in the long run.

Well might Macaulay say that he would rather a boy should learn to
lisp all the bad words in the language than grow up without a
mother. Froude's interrupted studies were nothing compared to a
childhood without love, and there was nobody to make him feel the
meaning of the word. Fortunately, though his father was always at
home, his brother was much away, and he was a good deal left to
himself after Robert's death. Hurrell did not disdain to employ him
in translating John of Salisbury's letters for his own Life of Becket.
No more was heard of the tanner, who had perhaps been only a threat.
While he wandered in solitude through the woods, or by the river,
his health improved, he acquired a passion for nature, and in his
father's library, which was excellent, he began eagerly to read. He
devoured Sharon Turner's History of England, and the great work of
Gibbon. Shakespeare and Spenser introduced him to the region of the
spirit in its highest and deepest, its purest and noblest forms.
Unhappily he also fell in with Byron, the worst poet that can come
into the hands of a boy, and always retained for him an admiration
which would now be thought excessive. By these means he gained much.
He discovered what poetry was, what history was, and he learned also
the lesson that no one can teach, the hard lesson of self-reliance.

This was the period, as everybody knows, of the Oxford Movement, in
which Hurrell Froude acted as a pioneer. Hurrell's ideal was the
Church of the Middle Ages represented by Thomas Becket. In the
vacations he brought some of his Tractarian friends home with him,
and Anthony listened to their talk. Strange talk it seemed. They
found out, these young men, that Dr. Arnold, one of the most
devoutly religious men who ever lived, was not a Christian. The
Reformation was an infamous rebellion against authority. Liberalism,
not the Pope, was  antichrist. The Church was above the State, and
the supreme ruler of the world. Transubstantiation, which the
Archdeacon abhorred, was probably true. Hurrell Froude was a
brilliant talker, a consummate dialectician, and an ardent
proselytising controversialist. But his young listener knew a little
history, and perceived that, to put it mildly, there were gaps in
Hurrell's knowledge.

When he heard that the Huguenots were despicable, that Charles I.
was a saint, that the Old Pretender was James III., that the
Revolution of 1688 was a crime, and that the Non-jurors were the
true confessors of the English Church, it did not seem to square
with his reading, or his reflections. Perhaps, after all, the
infallible Hurrell might be wrong. One fear he had never been able
to instil into his brother, and that was the fear of death. When
asked what would happen if he were suddenly called to appear in the
presence of God, Anthony replied that he was in the presence of God
from morning to night and from night to morning. That abiding
consciousness he never lost, and when his speculations went furthest
they invariably stopped there.

Left with his father and one sister, the boy drank in the air of
Dartmoor, and grew to love Devonshire with an unalterable affection.
He also continued his reading, and invaded theology. Newton on the
Prophecies remarked that "if the Pope was not Antichrist, he had bad
luck to be so like him," and Renan had not yet explained that
Antichrist was neither the Pope nor the French Revolution, but the
Emperor Nero. From Pearson on the Creed he learned the distinction
between "believing" and "believing in." When we believe in a person,
we trust him. When we believe a thing, we are not sure of it. This
is one of the few theological distinctions which are also
differences. Meanwhile, the Archdeacon had been watching his
youngest son, and had observed that he had at least a taste for
books. Perhaps he might not be the absolute dolt that Hurrell
pronounced him. He had lost five years, so far as classical training
was concerned, by the mismanagement of the Archdeacon himself.
Still, he was only seventeen, and there was time to repair the
waste. He was sent to a private tutor's in preparation for Oxford.
His tutor, a dreamy, poetical High Churchman, devoted to Wordsworth
and Keble, failed to understand his character or to give him an
interest in his work, and a sixth year was added to the lost five.

During this year his brother Hurrell died, and the tragic extinction
of that commanding spirit seemed a presage of his own early doom.
Two of his sisters, both lately married, died within a few months of
Hurrell, and of each other. The Archdeacon, incapable of expressing
emotion, became more reserved than ever, and scarcely spoke at all.
Sadly was he disappointed in his children. Most of them went out of
the world long before him. Not one of them distinguished himself in
those regular professional courses which alone he understood as
success. Hurrell joined ardently, while his life was spared, in the
effort to counteract the Reformation and Romanise the Church of
England. William, though he became a naval architect of the highest
possible distinction, and performed invaluable services for his
country, worked on his own account, and made his own experiments in
his own fashion. Anthony, too, took his line, and went his way,
whither his genius led him, indifferent to the opinion of the world.
His had been a strange childhood, not without its redeeming
features. Left to himself, seeing his brothers and sisters die
around him, expecting soon to follow them, the boy grew up stern,
hardy, and self-reliant. He was by no means a bookworm. He had
learned to ride in the best mode, by falling off, and had acquired a
passion for fishing which lasted as long as his life. There were few
better yachtsmen in England than Froude, and he could manage a boat
as well as any sailor in his native county. His religious education,
as he always said himself, was thoroughly wholesome and sound,
consisting of morality and the Bible. Sympathy no doubt he missed,
and he used to regard the early death of his brother Robert as the
loss of his best friend. For his father's character he had a
profound admiration as an embodiment of all the manly virtues,
stoical rather than Christian, never mawkish nor effeminate.


CHAPTER II

OXFORD

Westminster, it will have been seen, did less than nothing for
Froude. His progress there was no progress at all, but a movement
backwards, physical and mental deterioration. He recovered himself
at home, his father's coldness and unkindness notwithstanding. But
it was not until he went to Oxford that his real intellectual life
began, and that he realised his own powers. In October, 1836, four
months after Hurrell's death, he came into residence at Oriel. That
distinguished society was then at the climax of its fame; Dr. Hawkins
was beginning his long career as Provost; Newman and Church were
Fellows; the Oriel Common Room had a reputation unrivalled in Oxford,
and was famous far beyond the precincts of the University. But of
these circumstances Froude thought little, or nothing. He
felt free. For the first time in his life the means of social
intercourse and enjoyment were at his disposal. His internal
weakness had been overcome, and his health, in spite of all he had
gone through, was good. He had an ample allowance, and facilities
for spending it among pleasant companions in agreeable ways. He had
shot up to his full height, five feet eleven inches, and from his
handsome features there shone those piercing dark eyes which riveted
attention where-ever they were turned. His loveless, cheerless
boyhood was over, and the liberty of Oxford, which, even after the
mild constraint of a public school, seems boundless, was to him the
perfection of bliss. He began to develop those powers of
conversation which in after years gave him an irresistible influence
over men and women, young and old. Convinced that, like his brothers
and sisters, he had but a short time to live, and having
certainly been full of misery, he resolved to make the best of his
time, and enjoy himself while he could. He was under no obligation
to any one, unless it were to the Archdeacon for his pocket-money.
His father and his brother, doubtless with the best intentions, had
made life more painful for him after his mother's death than they
could have made it if she had been alive. But Hurrell was gone, his
father was in Devonshire, and he could do as he pleased. He lived
with the idle set in college; riding, boating, and playing tennis,
frequenting wines and suppers. From vicious excess his intellect and
temperament preserved him. Deep down in his nature there was a
strong Puritan element, to which his senses were subdued.
Nevertheless, for two years he lived at Oxford in contented
idleness, saying with Isaiah, and more literally than the prophet,

"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die."

It was a wholly unreformed Oxford to which Froude came. If it
"breathed the last enchantments of the Middle Age," it was mediaeval
in its system too, and the most active spirits of the place, the
leaders of the Oxford Movement, were frank reactionaries, who hated
the very name of reform. Even a reduction in the monstrous number of
Irish Bishoprics pertaining to the establishment was indignantly
denounced as sacrilege, and was the immediate cause of Keble's
sermon on National Apostasy to which the famous "movement" has been
traced. John Henry Newman was at that time residing in Oriel, not as
a tutor, but as Vicar of St. Mary's. He was kind to Froude for
Hurrell's sake, and introduced him to the reading set. The
fascination of his character acted at once as a spell. Froude
attended his sermons, and was fascinated still more. For a time,
however, the effect was merely aesthetic. The young man enjoyed the
voice, the eloquence, the thinking power of the preacher as he might
have enjoyed a sonata of Beethoven's. But his acquaintance with the
reading men was not kept up, and he led an idle, luxurious life.
Nobody then dreamt of an Oxford Commission, and the Colleges, like
the University, were left to themselves. They were not economically
managed, and the expenses of the undergraduates were heavy. Their
battels were high, and no check was put upon the bills which they
chose to run up with tradesmen. Froude spent his father's: money,
and enjoyed himself. The dissipation was not flagrant. He was never
a sensualist, nor a Sybarite. Even then he had a frugal mind, and
knew well the value of money. "I remember," he says in The Oxford
Counter Reformation, an autobiographical essay--"I remember
calculating that I could have lived at a boarding-house on contract,
with every luxury which I had in college, at a reduction of fifty
per cent."* He was not given to coarse indulgence, and idleness was
probably his worst sin at Oxford. But his innocence of evil was not
ignorance; and though he never led a fast life himself, he knew
perfectly well how those lived who did.

--
* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 180.
--

An intellect like Froude's seldom slumbers long. He had to attend
lectures, and his old love of Homer revived. Plato opened a new
world, a word which never grows old, and becomes fresher the more it
is explored. Herodotus proved more charming than The Arabian Nights.
Thucydides showed how much wisdom may be contained in the form of
history. Froude preferred Greek to Latin, and sat up at night to
read the Philoctetes, the only work of literature that ever moved
him to tears. Aeschylus divided his allegiance with Sophocles. But
the author who most completely mastered him, and whom he most
completely mastered, was Pindar. The Olympian Odes seemed to him
like the Elgin Marbles in their serene and unapproachable splendour.
All this classical reading, though it cannot have been fruitless,
was not done systematically for the schools. Froude had no ambition,
believing that he should soon die. But a reading-party during the
Long Vacation of 1839 resulted in an engagement, which changed the
course of his life.

Hitherto he had been under the impression that nobody cared for him
at all, and that it mattered not what became of him. The sense of
being valued by another person made him value himself. He became
ambitious, and worked hard for his degree. He remembered how the
master of his first school had prophesied that he would be a Bishop.
He did not want to be a Bishop, but he began to think that such
grandeur would not have been predicted of a fool. Abandoning his
idle habits, he read night and day that he might distinguish himself
in the young lady's eyes. After six months her father interfered. He
had no confidence in the stability of this very young suitor's
character, and he put an end to the engagement. Froude was stunned
by the blow, and gave up all hope of a first class. In any case
there would have been difficulties. His early training in
scholarship had not been accurate, and he suffered from the blunders
of his education. But under the influence of excitement he had so
far made up for lost time that he got, like Hurrell, a second class
in the final classical schools. His qualified success gave him, no
satisfaction. He was suffering from a bitter sense of disappointment
and wrong. It seemed to him that he was marked out for misfortune,
and that there was no one to help him or to take any trouble about
him. Thrown back upon himself, however, he conquered his
discouragement and resolved that he would be the master of his fate.

It was in the year 1840 that Froude took his degree. Newman was then
at the height of his power and influence. The Tracts for the Times,
which Mrs. Browning in Aurora Leigh calls "tracts against the
times," were popular with undergraduates, and High Churchmen were
making numerous recruits. Newman's sermons are still read for their
style. But we can hardly imagine the effect which they produced when
they were delivered. The preacher's unrivalled command of English,
his exquisitely musical voice, his utter unworldliness, the fervent
evangelical piety which his high Anglican doctrine did not disturb,
were less moving than his singular power, which he seemed to have
derived from Christ Himself, of reading the human heart. The young
men who listened to him felt, each of them, as if he had confessed
his inmost thoughts to Newman, as if Newman were speaking to him
alone. And yet, from his own point of view, there was a danger in
his arguments, a danger which he probably did not see himself,
peculiarly insidious to an acute, subtle, speculative mind like
Froude's.

Newman's intellect, when left to itself, was so clear, so powerful,
so intense, that it cut through sophistry like a knife, and went
straight from premisses to conclusion. But it was only left to
itself within narrow and definite limits. He never suffered from
religious doubts. From Evangelical Protestantism to Roman
Catholicism he passed by slow degrees without once entering the
domain of scepticism. Dissenting altogether from Bishop Butler's
view that reason is the only faculty by which we can judge even of
revelation, he set religion apart, outside reason altogether. From
the pulpit of St. Mary's he told his congregation that Hume's
argument against miracles was logically sound. It was really more
probable that the witnesses should be mistaken than that Lazarus
should have been raised from the dead. But, all the same, Lazarus
was raised from the dead: we were required by faith to believe it,
and logic had nothing to do with the matter. How Butler would have
answered Hume, Butler to whom probability was the guide of life, we
cannot tell. Newman's answer was not satisfactory to Froude. If Hume
were right, how could he also be wrong? Newman might say, with
Tertullian, Credo quia impossibile. But mankind in general are not
convinced by paradox, and "to be suddenly told that the famous
argument against miracles was logically valid after all was at least
startling."*

--
* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 205.
--

Perplexed by this dilemma, Froude at Oxford as a graduate, taking
pupils in what was then called science, and would now be called
philosophy, for the Honour School of Literae Humaniores. He was soon
offered, and accepted, a tutorship in Ireland. His pupils father,
Mr. Cleaver, was rector of Delgany in the county of Wicklow. Mr.
Cleaver was a dignified, stately clergyman of the Evangelical
school. Froude had been taught by his brother at home, and by his
friends at Oxford, to despise Evangelicals as silly, ignorant,
ridiculous persons. He saw in Mr. Cleaver the perfect type of a
Christian gentleman, cultivated, pious, and well bred. Mrs. Cleaver
was worthy of her husband. They were both models of practical
Christianity. They and their circle held all the opinions about
Catholicism and the Reformation which Newman and the Anglo-Catholics
denounced. The real thing was always among them, and they did not
want any imitation. "A clergyman," says Froude, "who was afterwards
a Bishop in the Irish Church, declared in my hearing that the theory
of a Christian priesthood was a fiction; that the notion of the
Sacraments as having a mechanical efficacy irrespective of their
conscious effect upon the mind of the receiver was an idolatrous
superstition; that the Church was a human institution, which had
varied in form in different ages, and might vary again; that it was
always fallible; that it might have Bishops in England, and dispense
with Bishops in Scotland and Germany; that a Bishop was merely an
officer; that the apostolical succession was probably false as a
fact--and, if a fact, implied nothing but historical continuity. Yet
the man who said these things had devoted his whole life to his
Master's service--thought of nothing else, and cared for nothing
else."*

--
* Short Studies on Great Subjects, 4th series, p. 212.
--

Froude had been taught by his brother, and his brother's set, to
believe that Dissenters were, morally and intellectually, the scum
of the earth. Here were men who, though not Dissenters themselves,
held doctrines practically undistinguishable from theirs, and yet
united the highest mental training with the service of God and the
imitation of Christ. There was in the Cleaver household none of that
reserve which the Tractarians inculcated in matters of religion. The
Christian standard was habitually held up as the guide of life and
conduct, an example to be always followed whatever the immediate
consequences that might ensue. Mr. Cleaver was a man of moderate
fortune, who could be hospitable without pinching, and he was
acquainted with the best Protestant society in Ireland. Public
affairs were discussed in his house with full knowledge, and without
the frivolity affected by public men. O'Connell was at that time
supreme in the government of Ireland, though his reign was drawing
to a close. The Whigs held office by virtue of a compact with the
Irish leader, and their Under-Secretary at Dublin Castle, Thomas
Drummond, had gained the affections of the people by his sympathetic
statesmanship. An epigrammatic speaker said in the House of Commons
that Peel governed England, O'Connell governed Ireland, and the
Whigs governed Downing Street. It was all coming to an end. Drummond
died, the Whigs went out of office, Peel governed Ireland, and
England too. Froude just saw the last phase of O'Connellism, and he
did not like it. In politics he never looked very far below the
surface of things, and the wrongs of Ireland did not appeal to him.
That Protestantism was the religion of the English pale, and of the
Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster, not of the Irish people, was a
fact outside his thoughts. He saw two things clearly enough. One was
the strength and beauty of the religious faith by which the Cleavers
and their friends lived. The other was the misery, squalor, and
chronic discontent of the Catholic population, then almost twice as
large as after the famine it became. He did not pause to reflect
upon what had been done by laws made in England, or upon the
iniquity of taxing Ireland in tithes for the Church of a small
minority. He concluded simply that Protestantism meant progress, and
Catholicism involved stagnation. He heard dark stories of Ribbonism,
and was gravely assured that if Mr. Cleaver's Catholic coachman,
otherwise an excellent servant, were ordered to shoot his master, he
would obey. Very likely Mr. Cleaver was right, though the event did
not occur. What was the true origin of Ribbonism, what made it
dangerous, why it had the sympathy of the people, were questions
which Froude could hardly be expected to answer, inasmuch as they
were not answered by Sir Robert Peel.

While Froude was at Delgany there appeared the once famous Tract
Ninety, last of the series, unless we are to reckon Monckton
Milnes's One Tract More. The author of Tract Ninety was Newman, and
the ferment it made was prodigious. It was a subtle, ingenious, and
plausible attempt to prove that the Articles and other formularies
of the English Church might be honestly interpreted in a Catholic
sense, as embodying principles which the whole Catholic Church held
before the Reformation, and held still. Mr. Cleaver and his circle
were profoundly shocked. To them Catholicism meant Roman
Catholicism, or, as they called it, Popery. If a man were not a
Protestant, he had no business to remain in the United Church of
England and Ireland. If he did remain in it, he was not merely
mistaken, but dishonest, and sophistry could not purge him from the
moral stain of treachery to the institution of which he was an
officer. Froude's sense of chivalry was aroused, and he warmly
defended Newman, whom he knew to be as honest as himself, besides
being saintly and pure. If he had stopped there, all might have been
well. Mr. Cleaver was himself high-minded, and could appreciate the
virtue of standing up for an absent friend. But Froude went further.
He believed Newman to be legally and historically right. The Church
of England was designed to be comprehensive. Chatham had spoken of
it, not unfairly, as having an Arminian liturgy and Calvinist
articles. When the Book of Common Prayer assumed its present shape,
every citizen had been required to conform, and the policy of
Elizabeth was to exclude no one. The result was a compromise, and
Mr. Cleaver would have found it hard to reconcile his principles
with the form of absolution in the Visitation of the Sick. This was,
in Mr. Cleaver's opinion, sophistry almost as bad as Newman's, and
Froude's tutorship came to an end. There was no quarrel, and, after
a tour through the south of Ireland, where he saw superstition and
irreverence, solid churches, well-fed priests, and a starving
peasantry in rags, Froude returned for a farewell visit to Delgany.
On this occasion he met Dr. Pusey, who had been at Christ Church
with Mr. Cleaver, and was then visiting Bray. Dr. Pusey, however,
was not at his ease He was told by a clerical guest, afterwards a
Bishop, with more freedom than courtesy, that they wanted no Popery
brought to Ireland, they had enough of their own. The sequel is
curious. For while Newman justified Mr. Cleaver by going over to
Rome, his own sons, including Froude's pupil, became Puseyite
clergymen of the highest possible type. Froude returned to Oxford at
the beginning of 1842, and won the Chancellor's Prize for an English
essay on the influence of political economy in the development of
nations. In the summer he was elected to a Devonshire Fellowship at
Exeter, and his future seemed secure. But his mind was not at rest.
It was an age of ecclesiastical controversy, and Oxford was the
centre of what now seems a storm in a teacup. Froude became mixed up
in it. On the one hand was the personal influence of Newman, who
raised more doubts than he solved. On the other hand Froude's
experience of Evangelical Protestantism in Ireland, where he read
for the first time The Pilgrim's Progress, contradicted the
assumption of the Tractarians that High Catholicity was an essential
note of true religion. Gradually the young Fellow became aware that
High Church and Low Church did not exhaust the intellectual world.
He read Carlyle's French revolution, and Hero Worship, and Past and
Present. He read Emerson too. For Emerson and Carlyle the Church of
England did not exist. Carlyle despised it.

Emerson had probably not so much as given it a thought in his life.
But what struck Froude most about them was that they dealt with
actual phaenomena, with things and persons around them, with the
world as it was. They did not appeal to tradition, or to antiquity,
but to nature, and to the mind of man. The French Revolution, then
but half a century old, was interpreted by Carlyle not as
Antichrist, but as God's judgment upon sin.

Perhaps one view was not more historical than the other. But the first
was groundless, and second had at least some evidence in support of it.
God may be, or rather must be, conceived to work through other instruments
besides Christianity. "Neither in Jerusalem, nor on this mountain,
shall men worship the Father." Carlyle completed what Newman had
begun, and the dogmatic foundation of Froude's belief gave way. The
two greatest geniuses of the age, as he thought them, agreeing in
little else, agreed that Christianity did not rest upon reason. Then upon
what did it rest? Reason appeals to one. Faith is the appanage of a
few. From Carlyle Froude went to Goethe, then almost unknown at
Oxford, a true philosopher as well as a great poet, an example of
dignity, a liberator of the human soul.

The Church as a profession is not suitable to a man in Froude's
state of mind. But in Oxford at that time there flourished a lamentable
system which would have been felt to be irreligious if the
authorities of the place had known what religion really was. Most
Fellows lost their Fellowships in a very short time unless they took
orders, and Froude's Fellowship was in that sense a clerical one.
They were ordained as a matter of course, the Bishop requiring no
other title. They were not expected, unless they wished it, to take
any parochial duty, and the notion that they had a "serious call" to
keep their Fellowships can only be described as absurd. Froude had
no other profession in view, and he persuaded himself that a Church
established by law must allow a wider range of opinion than a
voluntary communion could afford to tolerate. As we have seen, he
had defended Tract Ninety, and he claimed for himself the latitude
which he conceded to Newman. It was in his case a mistake, as he
very soon discovered. But the system which encouraged it must bear a
large part of the blame. Meanwhile he had been employed by Newman on
an uncongenial task. After the discontinuance of Tracts for the
Times, Newman projected another series, called Lives of the Saints.
The idea was of course taken from the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum. But
Newman had a definite polemical purpose. Just as he felt the force
of Hume's argument against the probability of miracles, so he
realised the difficulty of answering Gibbon's inquiry when miracles
ceased. Had they ever ceased at all? Many Roman Catholics, if not
the most enlightened and instructed, thought not. Newman conceived
that the lives of English and Irish saints held much matter for
edification, including marvels and portents of various kinds. He
desired that these things should be believed, as he doubtless
believed them. They proved, he thought, if they could be proved
themselves, that supernatural power resided in the Church, and when
the Church was concerned he laid his reason aside.

He was extraordinarily sanguine. "Rationalise," he said to Froude,
"when the evidence is weak, and this will give credibility for
others, when you can show that the evidence is strong." Froude chose
St. Neot, a contemporary of Alfred, in whose life the supernatural
played a comparatively small part. He told his story as legend, not
quite as Newman wanted it. "This is all," he said at the end, "and
perhaps rather more than all, that is known of the life of the
blessed St. Neot." His connection with the series ceased. But his
curiosity was excited. He read far and wide in the Benedictine
biographies. No trace of investigation into facts could he discover.
If a tale was edifying, it was believed, and credibility had nothing
to do with it. The saints were beatified conjurers, and any nonsense
about them was swallowed, if it involved the miraculous element. The
effect upon Froude may be left to his own words. "St. Patrick I
found once lighted a fire with icicles, changed a French marauder
into a wolf, and floated to Ireland on an altar stone. I thought it
nonsense. I found it eventually uncertain whether Patricius was not
a title, and whether any single apostle of that name had so much as
existed."

Froude's scepticism was too indiscriminate when it assailed the
existence of St. Patrick, which is not now doubted by scholars,
baseless as the Patrician legends may be. Colgan's Lives of Irish
Saints had taken him back to Ireland, that he might examine the
scenes described. He visited them under the best guidance; and
Petre, the learned historian of the Round Towers, showed him a host
of curious antiquities, including a utensil which had come to be
called the Crown of Brian Boru. Legendary history made no impression
upon Froude. The actual state of Ireland affected him with the
deepest interest. A population of eight millions, fed chiefly upon
potatoes, and multiplying like rabbits, light-hearted, reckless, and
generous, never grudged hospitality, nor troubled themselves about
paying their debts. Their kindness to strangers was unbounded. In
the wilds of Mayo Froude caught the smallpox, and was nursed with a
devotion which he always remembered, ungrateful as in some of his
writings about Ireland he may seem. After his recovery he wandered
about the coast, saw the station of Protestant missionaries at
Achill, and was rowed out to Clare Island, where a disabled galleon
from the Armada had been wrecked. His studies in hagiology led him
to consider the whole question of the miraculous, and he found it
impossible to work with Newman any more. A religion which rested
upon such stories as Father Colgan's was a religion nurtured in
lies.

All this, however, had nothing to do with the Church of England by
law established, and Froude was ordained deacon in 1845. The same
year Newman seceded, and was received into the Church of Rome. No
similar event, before or since, has excited such consternation and
alarm. So impartial an observer as Mr. Disraeli thought that the
Church of England did not in his time recover from the blow. We are
only concerned with it here as it affected Froude. It affected him
in a way unknown outside the family. Hurrell Froude, who abhorred
private judgment as a Protestant error, had told his brothers that
when they saw Newman and Keble disagree they might think for
themselves. He felt sure that he was thereby guarding them against
thinking for themselves at all. But now the event which he
considered impossible had happened. Newman had gone to Rome. Keble
remained faithful to the Church of his baptism. Which side Hurrell
Froude would have taken nobody could say. He had died a clergyman of
the Church of England at the age of thirty-three, nine years before.
Anthony Froude had no inclination to follow Newman. But neither did
he agree with Keble. He thought for himself. Of his brief clerical
career there exists a singular record in the shape of a funeral
sermon preached at St. Mary's Church, Torquay, on the second Sunday
after Trinity, 1847. The subject was George May Coleridge, vicar of
the parish, the poet's nephew, who had been cut off in the prime of
life while Froude acted as his curate. The sermon itself is not
remarkable, except for being written in unusually good English. The
doctrine is strictly orthodox, and the simple life of a good clergyman
devoted to his people is described with much tenderness of feeling.

This sermon, of which he gave a copy to John Duke Coleridge, the
future Lord Chief Justice of England, was Froude's first experiment
in authorship, and it was at least harmless. As much cannot be said
for the second, two anonymous stories, called Shadows of the Clouds
and The Lieutenant's Daughter. The Lieutenant's Daughter has been
long and deservedly forgotten. Shadows of the Clouds is a valuable
piece of autobiography. Without literary merit, without any quality
to attract the public, it gives a vivid and faithful account of the
author's troubles at school and at home, together with a slight
sketch of his unfortunate love-affair.

Froude was a born story-teller, with an irresistible propensity for
making books. The fascination which, throughout his life, he had for
women showed itself almost before he was out of his teens; and in
this case the feeling was abundantly returned. Nevertheless he
could, within a few years, publish the whole narrative, changing
only the names, and then feel genuine surprise that the other person
concerned should be pained. He was not inconsiderate. Those who
lived with him never heard from him a rough or unkind word. But his
dramatic instinct was uncontrollable and had to be expressed. The
Archdeacon read the book, and was naturally furious. If he could
have been in any way convinced of his errors, which may be doubted,
to publish an account of them was not the best way to begin.
Reconciliation had been made impossible, and Anthony was left to his
own devices. His miscellaneous reading was not checked by an
ordination which imposed no duties. Goethe sent him to Spinoza, a
"God-intoxicated man," and a philosophical genius, but not a pillar
of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Vestiges of Creation, which had
appeared in 1844, woke Oxford to the discovery that physical science
might have something to say about the origin, or at least the
growth, of the universe. The writer, Robert Chambers, whose name was
not then known, so far anticipated Darwin that he dispensed with the
necessity for a special creation of each plant and animal. He did
not, any more than Darwin, attack the Christian religion, and he did
not really go much farther than Lucretius. But he had more modern
lights, he understood science, and he wrote in a popular style. He
made a lively impression upon Froude, who learnt from him that
natural phenomena were due to natural causes, at the same time that
he acquired from Spinoza a disbelief in the freedom of the will.
When Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, we know that the will is free, and
there's an end on't," he did not understand the question. We all
know that the will is free to act. But is man free to will? If
everything about a man were within our cognisance, we could predict
his conduct in given circumstances as certainly as a chemist can
foretell the effect of mixing an acid with an alkali. I have no
intention of expressing any opinion of my own upon this subject. The
important thing is that Froude became in the philosophic sense a
Determinist, and his conviction that Calvin was in that respect the
best philosopher among theologians strengthened his attachment to
the Protestant cause.

Protestantism apart, however, Froude's position as a clergyman had
become intolerable. He had been persuaded to accept ordination for
the reason, among others, that the Church could be reformed better
from within than from without.

But there were few doctrines of the Church that he could honestly
teach, and the straightforward course was to abandon the clerical
profession. Nowadays a man in Froude's plight would only have to
sign a paper, and he would be free. But before 1870 orders, even
deacon's orders, were indelible. Neither a priest nor a deacon could
sit in Parliament, or enter any other learned profession. Froude was
in great difficulty and distress. He consulted his friends Arthur
Stanley, Matthew Arnold, and Arthur Clough. Clough, though a layman,
felt the same perplexity as himself. As a Fellow and Tutor of Oriel
he had signed the Articles. Now that he no longer believed in them,
ought he not to live up his appointments? The Provost, Dr. Hawkins,
induced him to pause and reflect. Meanwhile he published a volume of
poetry, including the celebrated Bothie, about which Froude wrote to
him:

"I was for ever falling upon lines which gave me uneasy twitchings;
e.g. the end of the love scene:

"And he fell at her feet, and buried his face in her apron.

"I daresay the head would fall there, but what an image! It chimes
in with your notion of the attractiveness of the working business.
But our undisciplined ears have divided the ideas too long to bear
to have them so abruptly shaken together. Love is an idle sort of a
god, and comes in other hours than the working ones; at least I have
always found it so. I don't think of it in my working time, and when
I see a person I do love working (at whatever it may be), I have
quite another set of thoughts about her. . . It would do excellently
well for married affection, for it is the element in which it lives.
But I don't think young love gets born then. I only speak for
myself, and from a very limited experience. As to the story, I don't
the least object to it on The Spectator's ground. I think it could
not have been done in prose. Verse was wanted to give it dignity.
But if we find it trivial, the fault is in our own varnished selves.
We have been polished up so bright that we forget the stuff we are
made of."

Clough was in politics a Republican, and sympathised ardently with
the French Revolution of 1848. So did Charles Kingsley, a Cambridge
man, who was at that time on a visit to Exeter. But Kingsley, though
a disciple of Carlyle, was also a hard-working clergyman, who held
that the masses could be regenerated by Christian Socialism. Froude
had no faith in Socialism, nor in Christianity as the Church
understood it. In this year, 1848, Emerson also came to Oxford, and
dined with Clough at Oriel, where they thought him like Newman.
Froude was already an admirer of Emerson's essays, and laid his case
before the American moralist. Emerson gave him, as might have been
expected, no practical advice, but recommended him to read the
Vedas. Nothing mattered much to Emerson, who took the opportunity to
give a lecture in London on the Spiritual Unity of all Animated
Beings. Froude attended it, and there first saw Carlyle, who burst,
characteristically enough, into a shout of laughter at the close.
Carlyle loved Emerson; but the Emersonian philosophy was to him like
any other form of old clothes, only rather more grotesque than most.

In the Long Vacation of 1848 Froude went alone to Ireland for the
third time, and shut himself up at Killarney. From Killarney he
wrote a long account of himself to Clough:

"KILLARNEY, July 15, 1848.

"I came over here where for the present I am all day in the woods
and on the lake and retire at night into an unpleasant hotel, where
I am sitting up writing this and waiting with the rest of the
household rather anxiously for the arrival of a fresh wedded pair.
Next week I move off across the lake to a sort of lodge of Lord
Kenmare, where I have persuaded an old lady to take me into the
family. I am going to live with them, and I am going to have her
ladyship's own boudoir to scribble in. It is a wild place enough
with porridge and potatoes to eat, varied with what fish I may
provide for myself and arbutus berries if it comes to starving. The
noble lord has been away for some years. They will put a deal table
into the said boudoir for me, and if living under a noble roof has
charms for me I have that at least to console myself with. I can't
tell about your coming. There may be a rising in September, and you
may be tempted to turn rebel, you know; and I don't know whether you
like porridge, or whether a straw bed is to your--not 'taste,'
touch is better, I suppose. It is perfectly beautiful here, or it
would be if it wasn't for the swarm of people about one that are for
ever insisting on one's saying so. Between hotel-keeper and carmen
and boatmen and guides that describe to my honour the scenery, and
young girls that insist on my honour taking a taste of the goats'
milk, and a thousand other creatures that insist on boring me and
being paid for it, I am really thankful every night when I get to my
room and find all the pieces of me safe in their places. However, I
shall do very well when I get to my lodge, and in the meantime I am
contented to do ill. I have hopes of these young paddies after all.
I think they will have a fight for it, or else their landlords will
bully the Government into strong measures as they call them--and then
will finally disgust whatever there is left of doubtful loyalty in
the country into open unloyalty, and they will win without fighting.
There is the most genuine hatred of the Irish landlords everywhere
that I can remember to have heard expressed of persons or things. My
landlady that is to be next week told me she believed it was God's
doing. If God wished the people should be stirred up to fight, then
it was all right they should do it; and if He didn't will, why
surely then there would be no fighting at all. I am not sure it
could have been expressed better. I have heard horrid stories in
detail of the famine. They are getting historical now, and the
people can look back at them and tell them quietly. It is very lucky
for us that we are let to get off for the most part with
generalities, and the knowledge of details is left to those who
suffer them. I think if it was not so we should all go mad or shoot
ourselves.

"The echoes of English politics which come over here are very
sickening: even The Spectator exasperates me with its d--d cold-
water cure for all enthusiasm. When I see these beautiful mountain
glens, I quite long to build myself a little den in the middle of
them, and say good-bye to the world, with all its lies and its
selfishness, till other times. I have still one great consolation
here, and that is the rage and fury of the sqireens at the poor
rates; six and sixpence in the pound with an estate mortgaged right
up to high-water mark and the year's income anticipated is not the
very most delightful prospect possible.

"The crows are very fat and very plenty. They sit on the roadside
and look at you with a kind of right of property. There are no
beggars--at least, professional ones. They were all starved-dead,
gone where at least I suppose the means of subsistence will be found
for them. There is no begging or starving, I believe, in the two
divisions of Kingdom Come. I see in The Spectator the undergraduates
were energetically loyal at Commemoration--nice boys--and the dons
have been snubbed about Guizot. Is there a chance for M---? Poor
fellow, he is craving to be married, and ceteris paribus I suppose
humanity allows it to be a claim, though John Mill doesn't. My
wedding party have not arrived. It is impossible not to feel a
kindly interest in them. At the bottom of all the agitation a
wedding sets going in us all there is lying, I think a kind of
misgiving, a secret pity for the fate of the poor rose which is
picked now and must forthwith wither; and our boisterous
jollification is but an awkward barely successful effort at
concealing it. Well, good-bye. I hardly know when I look over
these pages whether to wish you to get them or not.

"Yours notwithstanding,
"J.A.F."

Ireland had been devastated, far more than decimated, by the famine,
and was simmering with insurrection, like the Continent of Europe.
The Corn Laws had gone, and the Whigs were back in office, but they
could do nothing with Ireland. To Froude it appeared as if the
disturbed state of the country were an emblem of distracted Churches
and outworn creeds. Religion seemed to him hopelessly damaged, and
he asked himself whether morality would not follow religion. If the
Christian sanction were lost, would the difference between right and
wrong survive? His own state of mind was thoroughly wretched. The
creed in which he had been brought up was giving way under him, and
he could find no principle of action at all. Brooding ceaselessly
over these problems, he at the same time lowered his physical
strength by abstinence, living upon bread, milk, and vegetables,
giving up meat and wine. In this unpromising frame of mind, and in
the course of solitary rambles, he composed The Nemesis of Faith.*
The book is, both in substance and in style, quite unworthy of
Froude. But in the life of a man who afterwards wrote what the world
would not willingly let die it is an epoch of critical importance.
To describe it in a word is impossible. To describe it in a few
words is not easy. Froude himself called it in after life a "cry of
pain," meaning that it was intended to relieve the intolerable
pressure of his thoughts. It is not a novel, it is not a treatise,
it is not poetry, it is not romance. It is the delineation of a
mood; and though it was called, with some reason, sceptical, its
moral, if it has a moral, is that scepticism leads to misconduct.
That unpleasant and unverified hypothesis, soon rejected by Froude
himself, has been revived by M. Bourget in Le Disciple, and L'Etape.
The Nemesis of Faith is as unwholesome as either of these books, and
has not their literary charm. It had few friends, because it
disgusted free-thinking Liberals as much as it scandalised orthodox
Conservatives. If it were read at all nowadays, as it is not, it
would be read for the early sketches of Newman and Carlyle,
afterwards amplified in memorable pages which are not likely to
perish.

--
* Chapman, 1849.
--

In a letter to Charles Kingsley, written from Dartington on New
Year's Day, 1849, Froude speaks with transparent candour of his
book, and of his own mind:

"I wish to give up my Fellowship. I hate the Articles. I have said I
hate chapel to the Rector himself; and then I must live somehow, and
England is not hospitable, and the parties here to whom I am in
submission believe too devoutly in the God of this world to forgive
an absolute apostasy. Under pain of lost favour for ever if I leave
my provision at Oxford, I must find another, and immediately. There
are many matters I wish to talk over with you. I have a book
advertised. You may have seen it. It is too utterly subjective to
please you. I can't help it. If the creatures breed, they must come
to the birth. There is something in the thing, I know; for I cut a
hole in my heart, and wrote with the blood. I wouldn't write such
another at the cost of the same pain for anything short of direct
promotion into heaven."

Of Kingsley himself Froude wrote* to another clerical friend, friend
of a lifetime, Cowley Powles: "Kingsley is such a fine fellow--I
almost wish, though, he wouldn't write and talk Chartism, and be
always in such a stringent excitement about it all. He dreams of
nothing but barricades and provisional Governments and grand
Smithfield bonfires, where the landlords are all roasting in the fat
of their own prize oxen. He is so musical and beautiful in poetry,
and so rough and harsh in prose, and he doesn't know the least that
it is because in the first the art is carrying him out of himself,
and making him forget just for a little that the age is so entirely
out of joint." A very fine and discriminating piece of criticism.

--
* April 10th, 1849.
--

The immediate effect of The Nemesis, the only effect it ever had,
was disastrous. Whatever else it might be, it was undoubtedly
heretical, and in the Oxford of 1849 heresy was the unpardonable
sin. The Senior Tutor of Exeter, the Reverend William Sewell, burnt
the book during a lecture in the College Hall. Sewell, afterwards
founder and first Warden of Radley, was a didactic Churchman, always
talking or writing, seldom thinking, who contributed popular
articles to The Quarterly Review. The editor, Lockhart, knew their
value well enough. They tell one nothing, he said, they mean
nothing, they are nothing, but they go down like bottled velvet.
Sewell's eccentricities could not hurt Froude. But more serious
consequences followed. The Governing Body of Exeter, the Rector* and
Fellows, called upon him to resign his Fellowship. This they had no
moral right to do, and Froude should have rejected the demand. For
though his name and college were on the title-page of the book, the
book itself was a work of fiction, and he could not justly be held
responsible for the opinions of the characters. Expulsion was,
however, held out to him as the alternative of resignation.

--
* Dr. Richards.
--

"If the Rector will permit me," he wrote from Oxford to Clough,
"tomorrow I cease to be a Fellow of the College. But there is a
doubt if he will permit it, and will not rather try to send me out
in true heretic style. My book is therefore, as you may suppose,
out. I know little of what is said, but it sells fast, and is being
read, and is producing sorrow this time, I understand, as much as
anger, but the two feelings will speedily unite."

If he could have appealed to a court of law, the authorities would
probably have failed for want of evidence, and Froude would have
retained his Fellowship. But he was sensitive, and yielded to
pressure. He signed the paper presented to him as if he had been a
criminal, and shook the dust of the University from his feet. Within
ten years a new Rector, quite as orthodox as the old, had invited
him to replace his name on the books of the college. It was long,
however, before he returned to an Oxford where only the buildings
were the same. Twenty years from this date an atheistic treatise
might have been written with perfect impunity by any Fellow of any
college. Nobody would even have read it if atheism had been its only
recommendation. The wise indifference of the wise had relieved true
religion from the paralysis of official patronage. But in 1849 the
action of the Rector and Fellows was heartily applauded by the
Visitor, Bishop Phillpotts, the famous Henry of Exeter. Their
behaviour was conscientious, and Dr. Richards, the Rector, was a
model of dignified urbanity. It is unreasonable to blame men for not
being in advance of their age.


CHAPTER III

LIBERTY

Froude's position was now, from a worldly point of view, deplorable.
For the antagonism of High Churchmen he was of course prepared.
"Never mind," he wrote to Clough of The Nemesis, "if the Puseyites
hate it; they must fear it, and it will work in the mind they have
made sick." But he was also assailed in the Protestant press as an
awful example of what the Oxford Movement might engender. His book
was denounced on all sides, even by freethinkers, who regarded it as
a reproach to their cause. The professors of University College,
London, had appointed him to a mastership at Hobart Town in
Australia, for which he applied the year before in the hope that
change of scene might help to re-settle his mind. On reading the
attacks in the newspapers they pusillanimously asked him to
withdraw, and he withdrew. A letter to Clough, dated the 6th of
March, 1849, explains his intellectual and material position at this
time in a vivid and striking manner.

"I admire Matt. to a very great extent, only I don't see what
business he has to parade his calmness, and lecture us on
resignation, when he has never known what a storm is, and doesn't
know what to resign himself to. I think he only knows the shady side
of nature out of books. Still I think his versifying, and generally
his aesthetic power is quite wonderful .... On the whole he shapes
better than you, I think, but you have marble to cut out, and he has
only clay .... Do you think that if the Council do ask me to give up
I might fairly ask Lord Brougham as their President to get me helped
instead to ever so poor an honest living in the Colonies? I can't
turn hack writer, and I must have something fixed to do. Congreve is
down-hearted about Oxford: not so I. I quite look to coming back in
a very few years."

The Archdeacon, conceiving that the best remedy for free thought was
short commons, stopped his son's allowance. Froude would have been
alone in the world, if the brave and generous Kingsley had not come
to his assistance. Like a true Christian, he invited Froude to his
house, and made him at home there. To appreciate the magnanimity of
this offer we must consider that Kinglsey was himself suspected of
being a heretic, and that his prominent association with Froude
brought him letters of remonstrance by every post. He said nothing
about them, and Froude, in perfect ignorance of what he was
inflicting upon his host, stayed two months with him at Ilfracombe
and Lynmouth. Yet Kingsley did not, and could not, agree with
Froude. He was a resolved, serious Christian, and never dreamt of
giving up his ministry. He did not in the least agree with Froude,
who made no impression upon him in argument. He acted from kindness,
and respect for integrity.

Froude, however, could not stay permanently with the Kingsleys. His
father would have nothing to do with him, and in his son's opinion
was right to leave him with the consequences of his own errors. But
the outcry against him had been so violent and excessive as to
provoke a reaction. Froude might be an "infidel," he was not a
criminal, and in resigning his Fellowship he had shown more honesty
than prudence. His position excited the sympathy of influential
persons. Crabb Robinson, though an entire stranger to him, wrote a
public protest against Froude's treatment. Other men, not less
distinguished, went farther. Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian
Minister, Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, and others
whose names he never knew, subscribed a considerable sum of money
for maintaining the unpopular writer at a German university while he
made a serious study of theological science. But he had had enough
of theology, and the munificent offer was declined, though Bunsen
harangued him enthusiastically for five hours in Carlton Gardens on
the exquisite adaptation of Evangelical doctrines to the human soul,
until Froude began to suspect that they must have originated in the
soul itself.

At this time a greater change than the loss of his Fellowship came
upon Froude. While staying with the Kingsleys at Ilfracombe, he met
Mrs. Kingsley's sister, Charlotte Grenfell, the Argemone of Yeast, a
lady of somewhat wilful, yet most brilliant spirit, with a small
fortune of her own. Miss Grenfell had joined the Church of Rome two
years before, and at that time thought of entering a convent. This
idea was extremely distasteful to her sister and her sister's
husband. Their favourite remedy for feminine caprice was marriage,
and they soon had the satisfaction of seeing Miss Grenfell become
Mrs. Froude. There were some difficulties in the way, for Froude's
prospects were by no means assured, and Mrs. Kingsley felt
occasional scruples. But Froude had confidence in himself, and when
his mind was made up he would not look back.

"You remember," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley, in 1849, "I warned you
that I intended to take my own way in life, doing (as I always have
done) in all important matters just what I should think good, at
whatever risk of consequences, and taking no other person's opinion
when it crossed with my own. Now in this matter I feel certain that
the way to save Charlotte most pain is to shorten the struggle, and
that will be best done by being short, peremptory, and decided in
allowing no dictation and no interference .... Charlotte herself is
really magnificent. Every letter shows me larger nobleness of heart.
You cannot go back now, Mrs. Kingsley."

Mrs. Kingsley did not go back, and Froude had his way. Before the
wedding, however, another and a novel experience awaited him. His
misfortunes aroused the interest of a rich manufacturer at
Manchester, Mr. Darbishire, who offered him a resident tutorship,
and would have taken him into his own firm, even, as it would seem,
into his own family, if he had desired to become a man of business,
and to live in a smoky town. But Froude was engaged to be married,
and had a passionate love of the country. His keen, clear, rapid
intelligence would probably have served him well in commercial
affairs when once he had learnt to understand them. He was reserved
for a very different destiny, and he gratefully declined Mr.
Darbishire's offer. Nevertheless, his stay at Manchester as private
tutor had some share in his mental development. He made acquaintance
with interesting persons, such as Harriet Martineau, Geraldine
Jewsbury, Mrs. Gaskell, and William Edward Forster, then known as a
young Quaker who had devoted himself, in the true Quaker spirit of
self-sacrifice, to relieving the sufferers from the Irish famine.
Besides Manchester friends, Froude imbibed Manchester principles. He
had been half inclined to sympathise with the socialism of Louis
Blanc and other French revolutionists. Manchester cured him. He
adopted the creed of individualism, private enterprise, no
interference by Government, and free trade. In these matters he did
not, at that time, go with Carlyle, as in ecclesiastical matters he
had not gone with Newman. His mind was intensely practical, though
in personal questions of self-interest he was careless, and even
indifferent. Henceforth he abandoned speculation, as well
philosophical as theological, and reverted to the historical studies
of his youth. Philosophy at Oxford in those days meant Plato,
Aristotle, and Bishop Butler. Froude was a good Greek scholar, and
he had the true Oxford reverence for Butler. But he had not gone
deeper into philosophy than his examinations and his pupils
required. He liked positive results, and metaphysicians always
suggested to him the movements of a squirrel in a cage.

The alternative to business was literature. Biographies of literary
men, said Carlyle, are the most wretched documents in human history,
except the Newgate Calendar. But Carlyle said many things he did not
believe, and this was probably one of them. The truth is, that the
literary profession, like the commercial, requires some little
capital with which to set out, and Froude received this with his
wife. Besides it he had brilliant talents, unflagging industry, and
powers of writing such as have seldom been given to any of the sons
of men. While at Manchester he composed The Cat's Pilgrimage, the
earliest of his Short Studies in date. The moral of this fanciful
fable is very like the moral of Candide.

The discontented cat, tired of her monotonously comfortable place on
the hearthrug, goes out into the world, and gets nothing more than
experience for her pains. She finds the other animals occupied with
their own concerns, and enjoying life because they do not go beyond
them. Not a very elevating paper, perhaps, but better than The
Nemesis of Faith, and Froude's last word on the subjects that had
tormented his youth.

He recoiled from materialism, finding that it offered no explanation
of the universe. Faith in God he had never entirely lost, and on
that he founded his henceforth unshaken belief in the providential
government of the world. Whatever might be the origin of the
Christian religion, it furnished the best guide of life; and
spiritual truth, as Bunsen said, was independent of history. He had
no sort of sympathy with those who rejected belief in Christianity
altogether, still less with those who abandoned Theism. Although he
could not be a minister of the Church, he was content to be a
member, understanding the Church to be what he was brought up to
think it, the national organ of religion, a Protestant, evangelical
establishment under the authority of the law and the supremacy of
the Crown.

Froude returned to Manchester immediately after his marriage, but
his wife did not like the place nor the people. They looked about
for a country home, and were fortunate enough to find the most
enchanting spot in North Wales. Plas Gwynant, the shining place,
stands on a rising ground surrounded by woods, at the foot of
Snowdon, between Capel Curig and Beddgelert. Beyond the lawn and
meadow is Dinas Lake. A cherry orchard stood close to the house
door, and a torrent poured through a rocky ravine in the grounds,
falling into a pool below. A mile up the valley was the glittering
lake, Lyn Gwynant, with a boat and plenty of fishing. Good shooting
was also within reach.

To this ideal home Froude came with his wife in the summer of 1850.
Here began a new life of cloudless happiness and perfect peace. His
spiritual difficulties fell away from him, and he found that the
Church in which he had been born was comprehensive enough for him,
as for others. He was not called upon to solve problems which had
baffled the subtlest intellects, and would baffle them till the end
of time. Religion could be made practical, and not until its
practical lessons had been exhausted was it necessary to go farther
afield. "Do the duty that lies nearest you," said Goethe, who knew
art and science, literature and life, as few men have known them.
Froude was never idle, and never at a loss for amusement. Although
he wrote regularly, and his love of reading was a passion, he had
the keenest enjoyment of sport and expeditions, of country air and
sights and sounds, of natural beauty and physical exercise. It was
impossible to be dull in his company, for he was the prince of
conversers, drawing out as much as he gave. No wonder that there
were numerous visitors at Plas Gwynant. He was the best and warmest
of friends. In London he would always lay aside his work for the day
to entertain one of his contemporaries at Oxford, and at Plas
Gwynant they found a hospitable welcome. He would fish with them, or
shoot with them, or boat with them, or walk with them, discussing
every subject under heaven. Perhaps the most valued of his guests
was Clough, who had then written most of his poetry, and projected
new enterprises, not knowing how short his life would be.

Besides Clough, Matthew Arnold came to Plas Gwynant, and Charles
Kingsley, and John Conington, the Oxford Professor of Latin, and Max
Muller, the great philologist. A letter to Max Muller, dated the
25th of June, 1851, gives a pleasant picture of existence there.

"I shall be so glad to see you in July. Come and stay as long as
work will let you, and you can endure our hospitality. We are poor,
and so are not living at a high rate. I can't give you any wine,
because I haven't a drop in the house, and you must bring your own
cigars, as I am come down to pipes. But to set against that, you
shall have the best dinner in Wales every day--fresh trout, Welsh
mutton, as much bitter ale as you can drink; a bedroom and a little
sitting-room joining it all for your own self, and the most
beautiful look-out from the window that I have ever seen. You may
vary your retirement. You may change your rooms for the flower-
garden, which is an island in the river, or for the edge of the
waterfall, the music of which will every night lull you to sleep.
Last of all, you will have the society of myself, and of my wife,
and, what ought to weigh with you too, you will give us the great
pleasure of yours."

Clough neither fished, nor shot, nor boated, but as a walking
companion there was no one, in Froude's opinion, to be put above
him. For fishing he gave pre-eminence to Kingsley, and together they
carried up their coracles to waters higher than ordinary boats could
reach. Kingsley was ardent in all forms of sport, and an enthusiast
for Maurician theology, holding, as he said, that it had pleased God
to show him and Maurice things which He had concealed from Carlyle.
He had concealed them also from Froude, who regarded Carlyle as his
teacher, feeling that he owed him his emancipation from clerical
bonds.

Froude and Kingsley did not agree either in theology or in politics.
"I meant to say," Froude wrote to his wife's brother-in-law in 1851,
"that the philosophical necessity of the Incarnation as a fact must
have been as cogent to the earliest thinkers as to ourselves. If we
may say it must have been, they might say so. And they might, and
indeed must, have concluded, each at their several date, that the
highest historical person known to them must have been the Incarnate
God; so that unless the Incarnation was the first fact in human
history, there must have been a time when they would have used the
argument and it would have led them wrong."

Concerning Kingsley's Socialism, especially as shown in Hypatia,
Froude was cold and critical. "It is by no means as yet clear to
me," he wrote about this time, "that all good people are Socialists,
and that therefore whoever sticks to the old thing is a bad fellow.
Whatever is has no end of claims on us. I have no doubt that we
could not get on without the devil. If it had not been so, he would
not have been. The ideas must be content to fight a long time before
they assimilate all the wholesome flesh in the universe, and we
cannot leave what works somehow for what only promises to work, and
has yet by no means largely realised that promise. I consider it a
bad sign in the thinkers among the Christian Socialists if they set
to cursing those who don't agree with them. The multitudes must, but
the thinkers should not. I cannot believe that if Clement of
Alexandria had been asked whether he candidly believed Tacitus was
damned because he was a heathen he would have said 'Yes.' Indeed, on
indifferent matters (supposing he had been alive in Tacitus's time),
I don't think he would have minded writing a leader in the Acta
Diurna, even though Tacitus followed on the other side!"

Oxford, and its old clothes, Froude had cast behind him. He had
never taken priest's orders, and the clerical disabilities imposed
upon him were not only cruel, but ridiculous. Shut out from the law,
he turned to literature, and became a regular reviewer. There was
not so much reviewing then as there is now, but it was better paid.
His services were soon in great request, for he wrote an
incomparable style.

The origin of Froude's style is not obscure. Too original to be an
imitator, he was in his handling of English an apt pupil of Newman.
There is the same ease, the same grace, the same lightness of
elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pass from racy,
colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each
other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our
grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary
was large and various. He was familiar with every device of
rhetoric. He could play with every pipe in the language, and sound
what stop he pleased. Oxford men used to talk very much in those
days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel
style. Perhaps the best example of it is Church, the accomplished
Dean of St. Paul's. Church does not rival Newman and Froude at their
best. But he never, as they sometimes do, falls into loose and
slipshod writing. He was the fine flower of the old Oxford
education, growing in hedged gardens, sheltered from the winds of
heaven, such as Catullus painted in everlasting colours long
centuries ago. Froude was a man of the world, who knew the classics,
and the minds of men, and cities, and governments, and the various
races which make up the medley of the universe. He wrote for the
multitude who read books for relaxation, who want to have their
facts clearly stated, and their thinking done for them. He satisfied
all their requirements, and yet he expressed himself with the
natural eloquence of a fastidious scholar. Lucky indeed were the
editors who could obtain the services of such a reviewer, and he was
fortunate in being able to recommend with power the poetry of his
friend, Matthew Arnold.*

--
* His recommendation was entirely sincere. "Matt. A.'s Sohrab and
Rustum," he wrote to Clough, "is to my taste all but perfect."
--

Although Froude enjoyed with avidity the conversation of his chosen
friends, he was not satisfied with intellectual epicureanism. He was
resolved to make for himself a name, to leave behind him some not
unworthy memorial. The history of the Reformation attracted him
strongly. If an historian is a man of science, or a mere chronicler,
then certainly Froude was not an historian. He made no claim to be
impartial. He held that the Oxford Movement was not only endangering
the National Church, but injuring the national character and
corrupting men's knowledge of the past. He believed in the
Reformation first as an historic fact, and secondly as a beneficent
revolt of the laity against clerical dominion. He denied that since
the Reformation there had been one Catholic Church, and as an
Englishman he asserted in the language of the Articles that the
Bishop of Rome had no jurisdiction within this realm of England. He
wanted to vindicate the reformers, and to prove that in the struggle
against Papal Supremacy English patriots took the side of the king.
He was roused to indignation by slanders against the character of
Elizabeth; and he held, as almost every one now holds, that the
attempt to make an innocent saint of Mary Stuart was futile. Even
More and Fisher he refused to accept as candidates for the crown of
martyrdom. They were both excellent men. More was, in some respects,
a great man. They were certainly far more virtuous than the king who
put them to death. But they were executed for treason, not for
heresy, and to clear their memory it is necessary to show that they
had no part in conspiring with a foreign Power against their lawful
sovereign. That Power, the Church of Rome, a Power till 1870, Froude
cordially hated. He regarded it as an obstacle to progress, an enemy
of freedom, an enslaver of the intellect and the soul. The English
Catholics of his own time were mild, honourable, and loyal. Although
they had been relieved of their disabilities, they had no power.
Froude's reading and reflection led him to infer that when the
Church was powerful it aimed a deadly blow at English independence,
and that Henry VIII., with all his moral failings, was entitled to
the credit of averting it. These opinions were not new. They were
held by most people when Froude was a boy. It was from Oxford that
an attack upon them came, and from Oxford came also, in the person
of Froude, their champion.

Froude's historical work took at first the form of essays, chiefly
in The Westminster Review and Fraser's Magazine. The Rolls Series of
State Papers had not then begun, and the reign of Henry was
imperfectly understood. Froude was  especially attracted by the age
of Elizabeth, who admired her father as a monarch, whatever she may
have thought of him as a man. It was an age of mighty dramatists, of
divine poets, of statesmen wise and magnanimous, if not great, of
seamen who made England, not Spain, the ruler of the seas. It was
with the seamen that Froude began. His essay on England's Forgotten
Worthies, which appeared in The Westminster Review for 1852, was
suggested by a new, and very bad, edition of Hakluyt. It inspired
Kingsley with the idea of his historical novel, Westward Ho! and
Tennyson drew from it, many years later, the story of his noble
poem, The Revenge. The eloquence is splendid, and the patriotic
fervour stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet. The cruelties
of the Spaniards in South America, perpetrated in the name of Holy
Church, are described with unflinching fidelity and unsparing truth.
For instance, four hundred French Huguenots were massacred in cold
blood by Spaniards, who invaded their settlement in Florida at a
time when France was at peace with Spain. These Protestants were
flayed alive, and, to show that it was done in the cause of
religion, an inscription was suspended over their bodies, "Not as
Frenchmen, but as heretics." Even at this distance of time it is
satisfactory to reflect that these defenders of the faith were not
left to the slow judgment of God. A French privateer, Dominique de
Gourges, whose name deserves to be held in honour and remembrance,
sailed from Rochelle, collected a body of American Indians, swooped
down upon the Spanish forts, and hanged their pious inmates,
wretches not less guilty than the authors of St. Bartholomew, with
the appropriate legend, "Not as Spaniards, but as murderers." "It
was at such a time," says Froude, "and to take their part amidst
such scenes as these, that the English navigators appeared along the
shores of South America as the armed soldiers of the Reformation,
and as the avengers of humanity." Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh, Davis,
Grenville, are bright names in the annals of British seamanship. But
they were not merely staunch patriots, and loyal subjects of the
great Queen; they were pioneers of civil and religious freedom from
the most grievous yoke and most intolerable bondage that had ever
oppressed mankind.

In The Westminster for 1853 appeared Froude's essay on the Book of
Job, which may be taken as his final expression of theological
belief. Henceforward he turned from theology to history, from
speculation to fact. Even his friendship for Frederic Maurice could
not rouse him to any great interest in the latter's expulsion from
King's College. "As thinkers," he wrote to Clough on the 22nd of
November, 1853, "Maurice, and still more the Mauricians, appear to
me the most hopelessly imbecile that any section of the world have
been driven to believe in. I am glad you liked Job, though my
writing it was a mere accident, and I am not likely to do more of
the kind. I am going to stick to the History in spite of your
discouragement, and I believe I shall make something of it. At
any rate one has substantial stuff between one's fingers to be moulding
at, and not those slime and sea sand ladders to the moon 'opinion.'"

Froude pursued his studies, reading all the collections of original
documents in Strype and other chroniclers. Why, he asked himself
should Henry, this bloody and ferocious tyrant, have been so popular
in his own lifetime? Parliament, judges, juries, all the articulate
classes of the community, why had they stood by him? No doubt he
could dissolve Parliament, and dismiss the judges. But to submit
without a struggle, without even protest or remonstrance, was not
like Englishmen, before or since. When Erasmus visited England he
found that the laity were the best read and the best behaved in
Europe, while the clergy were gluttonous, profligate, and
avaricious. No historian ever prepared himself more thoroughly for
his task than Froude. Sir Francis Palgrave, the Deputy Keeper of the
Records under Sir John Romilly, offered to let him see the
unpublished documents in the Chapter House at Westminster which
dealt with the later years of Wolsey's Government, and to the action
of Parliament after the Cardinal' s fall. He examined them
thoroughly, and accepted Parker's proposal that he should write the
history of the period. But he had to leave Plas Gwynant. The London
Library, which Carlyle had founded, sufficed for contributions to
magazines. History was a more serious affair, and it was necessary
for him to be, if not in London, at least near a railway. He
returned to his native county, and took a house at Babbicombe, from
which, after three years, he moved to Bideford. He made frequent
visits to London, where he was the guest of his publisher, John
Parker, at whose table he met Arthur Helps, John and Richard Doyle,
Cornewall Lewis, Richard Trench, then Dean of Westminster, and Henry
Thomas Buckle, once famous as a scientific historian. He called on
the Carlyles at their house in Chelsea, and began an intimacy only
broken by death. Carlyle himself was an excellent adviser in
Froude's peculiar field. He had the same Puritan leanings, the same
sympathy with the Reformation, the same hostility to ecclesiastical
interference with secular affairs, unless, as in the case of John
Knox, the interference was directed against Rome. Froude considered
him not unlike Knox in humour, keenness of intellect, integrity, and
daring. History was the one form of literature outside Goethe and
Burns for which he really cared. He had translated Wilhelm Meister
in 1824, and it was probably at his suggestion that Froude
translated Elective Affinities for Bohn's Library in 1850. Scottish
history and Scottish character Carlyle knew as he knew his Bible.
His assistance and encouragement, which were freely given, proved
invaluable to Froude.

Froude settled steadily down to work, dividing his time between
London and Devonshire. Shooting and fishing had for the time to be
dropped. For recreation he joined an archery club, where, as James
Spedding told him, you were always sure of your game. In after life
Froude, who never bore malice, used to say that his father had been
right in leaving him to his own resources, and that the necessity of
providing for himself was, in his instance, as in so many others,
the foundation of his career. He owed much to his publisher, John
Parker, who was liberal, generous, and confiding. Publishers, like
mothers-in-law, have got a bad name from bad jokes. Parker, by
trusting Froude, and relieving him from anxiety while he wrote,
smoothed the way for a memorable contribution to English history
which after many vicissitudes has now an established place as a work
of genius and research.

The principles on which he worked are explained in a contribution to
the volume of Oxford Essays for the year 1855.  The subject of this
brilliant though forgotten paper is the best means of teaching
English history, and the author's judgments upon modern historians
are peculiar. Hume and Hallam, the latter of whom was still living,
are indiscriminately condemned. Macaulay, whose first two volumes
were already famous, is ignored. The Oxford examiners are severely
censured for prescribing Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors as
authoritative, and Carlyle's Cromwell, a collection of materials
rather than a book, is pronounced to be the one good modern history,
though Froude denounces, with friendly candour, Carlyle's
"distempered antagonism to the prevailing fashions of the age." The
most characteristic part of this essay, however, is that which
recommends the Statutes, with their preambles, as the best text-
book, and the following passage would be confidently assigned by
most critics to the History itself:

"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.

"The Saturday Review temperament," he wrote, "is ten thousand
thousand times more damnable than the worst of Swinburne's skits.
Modern respectability is so utterly without God, faith, heart; it
shows so singular an ingenuity in and injuring everything that is
noble and good, and so systematic a preference for what is mean and
paltry, that I am not surprised at a young fellow dashing his heels
into the face of it .... When there is any kind of true genius, we
have no right to drive it mad. We must deal with it wisely, justly,
fairly."*

--
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 137.
--

Froude was an excellent editor; appreciative, discriminating, and
alert. He prided himself on Carlyle's approval, though perhaps
Carlyle was not the best judge of such things. His energy was
multifarious. Besides his History and his magazine, he found time
for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a
good audience. His discourse at the Royal Institution in February,
1864, on "The Science of History," for which he was "called an
atheist," is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really
scientific historian. According to Buckle, the history of mankind
was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the
past that made the impossibility of predicting the future. Great men
were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle
more erratic in their behaviour. Political economy was history in
little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other
natural, forces. But can we predict historical events, as we can
predict an eclipse? That is Froude's answer to Buckle, in the form
of a question.

"Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he
lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the
feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had
grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was
to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon's,
are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made
the greatest progress are the arts of destruction." It is difficult
to see the atheism in all this, but the common sense is plain
enough. Froude belonged to the school of literary historians, such
as were Thucydides and Tacitus, Gibbon and Finlay, not to the school
of Buckle, or, as we should now say, of Professor Bury.

In 1865 Froude removed from Clifton Place, Hyde Park, to Onslow
Gardens in South Kensington, where he lived for the next quarter of
a century. In 1868 the students of St. Andrews chose him to be Lord
Rector of the University, and on the 23rd of March, 1869, he
delivered his Inaugural Address on Education, which compared the
plain living and high thinking of the Scottish Universities with the
expensive and luxurious idleness that he remembered at Oxford.
Froude was delighted with the compliment the students had paid him,
and they were equally charmed with their Rector. In fact, his visit
to St. Andrews produced in 1869 a suggestion that he should become
the Parliamentary representative of that University and of
Edinburgh. But the injustice of the law as it then stood
disqualified him as a candidate. His deacon's orders, the shadowy
remnant of a mistaken choice, stood in his way. Next year, in 1870,
Bouverie's Act passed, and Froude was one of the first to take
advantage of it by becoming again, what he had really never ceased
to be, a layman. As he did not enter the House of Commons, it is
idle to speculate on what might have been his political career.
Probably it would have been undistinguished. He was not a good
speaker, and he was a bad party man. His butler, who had been long
with him, and knew him well, was once asked by a canvassing agent
what his master's politics were. "Well," he said reflectively, "when
the Liberals are in, Mr. Froude is sometimes a Conservative. When
the Conservatives are in, Mr. Froude is always a Liberal." His own
master, Carlyle, had been in early life an ardent reformer, and had
hoped great things from the Act of 1832. Perhaps he did not know
very clearly what he expected. At any rate he was disappointed, and,
though he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Peel alter the abolition
of the Corn Laws, he regarded the Reform Act of 1867 with indignant
disgust.

Froude had a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli. Gladstone
he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to
understand. He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught
from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic
party in the Church of England, and Gladstone's financial genius was
out of his line. The Liberal Government of 1868 was in his opinion
criminally indifferent to the Colonies. An earnest advocate of
Federation, he did not see that the best way of retaining colonial
loyalty was to preserve colonial independence intact. Nevertheless
Froude was a pioneer of the modern movement, still in progress, for
a closer union with the scattered parts of the British Empire. He
feared that the Colonies would go if some effort were not made to
retain them, and he turned over in his mind the various means of
building up a federal system. Although Canadian Federation was
emphatically Canadian in its origin, and had been adopted in
principle by Cardwell during the Government of Lord Russell, it was
Lord Carnarvon who carried it out, and he had no warmer supporter
than Froude.

Of Froude's favourite recreations at this time the best account is
to be found in his two Short Studies on A Fortnight in Kerry. From
1868 to 1870 he rented from Lord Lansdowne a place called Derreen,
thirty-six miles from Killarney, and seventeen from Kenmare, where
he spent the best part of the summer and autumn. If Froude did not
altogether understand the Irish people, at least the Irish
Catholics, and had no sympathy with their political aspirations, he
loved their humour, and the scenery of "the most beautiful island in
the world" had been familiar to him from his early manhood. In one
of his youthful rambles he had been struck down by small-pox, and
nursed with a devotion which he never forgot. Yet between him and
the Celt, as between him and the Catholic, there was a mysterious,
impassable barrier. They had not the same fundamental ideas of right
and wrong. They did not in very truth worship the same God. But of
Froude and the Irish I shall have to speak more at length hereafter.
In Kerry he enjoyed himself, while at the same time he finished his
History of England, and his description of the country is
enchanting.

"A glance out of the window in the morning showed that I had not
overrated the general charm of the situation. The colours were
unlike those of any mountain scenery to which I was accustomed
elsewhere. The temperature is many degrees higher than that of the
Scotch highlands. The Gulf Stream impinges full upon the mouths of
its long bays. Every tide carries the flood of warm water forty
miles inland, and the vegetation consequently is rarely or never
checked by frost even two thousand feet above the sea-level. Thus
the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of
grass as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and
precipices to the very summits. The rock, chiefly old red sandstone,
is purple. The heather, of which there are enormous masses, is in
many places waist deep." Yachting and fishing, fishing and yachting,
were the staple amusements at Derreen. Nothing was more
characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air.
Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved. "I always
consider," he said, "that the proudest moment of my life was, when
sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodcocks." For
luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never
cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own
words. "I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my
five brace of grouse. I see no amusement in dawdling over a lowland
moor where the packs are as thick as chickens in a poultry-yard. I
like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered
covers, when I know not what may rise--a woodcock, an odd pheasant,
a snipe in the out-lying willow-bed, and perhaps a mallard or a
teal. A hare or two falls in agreeably when the mistress of the
house takes an interest in the bag. I detest battues and hot
corners, and slaughter for slaughter's sake. I wish every tenant in
England had his share in amusements which in moderation are good for
us all, and was allowed to shoot such birds or beasts as were bred
on his own farm, any clause in his lease to the contrary
notwithstanding." Considering that this passage was written ten
years before the Ground Game Act, it must be admitted that the
sentiment is remarkably liberal. The chief interest of these
papers,* however, is not political, but personal. They show what
Froude's natural tastes were, the tastes of a sportsman and a
country gentleman. He had long outgrown the weakness of his boyhood,
and his physical health was robust. With a firm foot and a strong
head he walked freely over cliffs where a false step would have
meant a fall of a thousand feet. No man of letters was ever more
devoted to exercise and sport. Though subject, like most men, and
all editors, to fits of despondency, he had a sound mind in a
healthy frame, and his pessimism was purely theoretical.

--
* Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 217-308.
--

Froude's History, the great work of his life, was completed in 1870.
He deliberately chose, after the twelve volumes, to leave Elizabeth
at the height of her power, mistress of the seas, with Spain crushed
at her feet. As he says himself, in the opening paragraph of his own
Conclusion, "Chess-players, when they have brought their game to a
point at which the result can be foreseen with certainty, regard
their contest as ended, and sweep the pieces from the board." Froude
had accomplished his purpose. He had rewritten the story of the
Reformation. He had proved that the Church of England, though in a
sense it dated from St. Austin of Canterbury, became under Henry
VIII. a self-contained institution, independent of Rome and subject
to the supremacy of the Crown.

Elizabeth altered the form of words in which her father had
expressed his ecclesiastical authority; but the substance was in
both cases the same. The sovereign was everything. The Bishop of
Rome was nothing. There has never been in the Church of England
since the divorce of Katharine any power to make a Bishop without
the authority of the Crown, or to change a doctrine without the
authority of Parliament, nor has any layman been legally subject to
temporal punishment by the ecclesiastical courts. Convocation cannot
touch an article or a formulary. King, Lords, and Commons can make
new formularies or abolish the old. The laity owe no allegiance to
the Canons, and in every theological suit the final appeal is to the
King in Council, now the Judicial Committee. Since the accession of
Elizabeth divine service has been performed in English, and the
English Bible has been open to every one who can read. Yet there are
people who talk as if the Reformation meant nothing, was nothing,
never occurred at all. This theory, like the shallow sentimentalism
which made an innocent saint and martyr of Mary Stuart, has never
recovered from the crushing onslaught of Froude.

Mr. Swinburne in the Encyclopaedia Britannica reduces the latter
theory to an absurdity, by demonstrating that if Mary was innocent
she was a fool. In his defence of Elizabeth Froude stops short of
many admirers. He was disgusted by her feminine weakness for
masculine flattery; he dwells with almost tedious minuteness upon
her smallest intrigues; he exposes her parsimonious ingratitude to
her dauntless and unrivalled seamen. Yet for all that he brings out
the vital difference between her and Mary Tudor, between the
Protestant and Catholic systems of government. Elizabeth boasted,
and boasted truly, that she did not persecute opinion. If people
were good citizens and loyal subjects, it was all the same to her
whether they went to church or to mass. Had it been possible to
adopt and apply in the sixteenth century the modern doctrine of
contemptuous indifference to sectarian quarrels, there was not one
of her subjects more capable of appreciating and acting upon it than
the great Queen herself. But in that case she would have estranged
her friends without conciliating her opponents. She would have
forfeited her throne and her life. Pius V. had not merely
excommunicated her, which was a barren and ineffective threat, a
telum imbelle sine ictu; he had also purported to depose her as a
heretic, and to release her subjects from the duty of allegiance.
Another Vicar of Christ, Gregory XIII., went farther. He intimated,
not obscurely, that whosoever removed such a monster from the world
would be doing God's service. This at least was no idle menace.
Those great leaders of Protestantism in Europe, Coligny, Murray,
William the Silent, were successively murdered within a few years.
That was, as Fra Paolo said when he saw the dagger (stilus) which
had wounded him, the style (stylus) of the Roman Court. It is all
very well to say that Gregory was a blasphemous, murderous old
bigot, and might have been left to the God of justice and mercy, who
would deal with him in His own good time. Before that time came,
Elizabeth might have been in her grave, Mary Stuart might have been
on the English throne, and the liberties of England might have been
as the liberties of Spain.

Elizabeth never felt personal fear. But she was not a private
individual. She was an English sovereign, and the keynote of all her
subtle, intricate, tortuous policy was the resolute determination,
from which she never flinched, that England should be independent,
spiritually as well as politically independent, of a foreign yoke.
Her connection with the Protestants was political, not theological,
for doctrinally she was farther from Geneva than from Rome. Her own
Bishops she despised, not unjustly, as time-servers, calling them
"doctors," not prelates. Although she did not really believe that
any human person, or any human formula, was required between the
Almighty and His creatures, she preferred the mass and the breviary
to the Book of Common Prayer. The Inquisition was the one part of
the Catholic system which she really abhorred. For the first twenty
years of her reign mass was celebrated in private houses with
impunity, though to celebrate it was against the law. No part of her
policy is more odious to modern notions of tolerance and
enlightenment than prohibition of the mass. Nothing shows more
clearly the importance of understanding the mental atmosphere of a
past age before we attempt to judge those who lived in it. Even
Oliver Cromwell, fifty years after Elizabeth's death, declared that
he would not tolerate the mass, and in general principles of
religious freedom he was far ahead of his age. Cromwell no doubt,
unlike Elizabeth, was a Protestant in the religious sense. But that
was not his reason. The mass to him, and still more to Elizabeth,
was a definite symbol of political disaffection. It was a rallying
point for those who held that a heretical sovereign had no right to
reign, and might lawfully be deposed, if not worse. Between the
Catholics of our day and the Catholics of Elizabeth's time there is
a great gulf fixed. What has fixed it is a question too complex to
be discussed 

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