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 in this place. Catholics still revere the memory of Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who gave his blessing to Campian and Parsons on their way to stir up rebellion in England, as well as in Ireland, and to assassinate Elizabeth if opportunity should serve. God said, "Thou shall do no murder." The Pope, however, thought that God had spoken too broadly, and that some qualification was required. The sixth commandment could not have been intended for the protection of heretics; and the Jesuits, if they did not inspire, at least believed him. Campian is regarded by thousands of good men and women, who would not hurt a fly, as a martyr to the faith, and to the faith as he conceived it he was a martyr. He endured torture and death without flinching rather than acknowledge that Elizabeth was lawful sovereign over the whole English realm. His courage was splendid. There never, for the matter of that, was a braver man than Guy Fawkes. But when Campian pretended that his mission to England was purely religious he was tampering with words in order to deceive. To him the removal of Elizabeth would have been a religious act. The Queen did all she could to make him save his life by recantation, even applying the cruel and lawless machinery of the rack. If his errand had been merely to preach what he regarded as Catholic truth, she would have let him go, as she checked the persecuting tendencies of her Bishops over and over again. But it was as much her duty to defend England from the invasion of the Jesuits as to defend her from the invasion of the Spanish Armada. Both indeed were parts of one and the same enterprise, the forcible reduction of England to dependence upon the Catholic powers. Although in God's good providence it was foiled, it very nearly succeeded; and if Elizabeth had not removed Campian, Campian might, as Babington certainly would, have remove her.

The Pope had been directly concerned in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and his great ally, Philip II., is said to have laughed for the first time when he heard of it. More than a hundred years afterwards the pious Bossuet thanked God for the frightful slaughter of the Huguenots which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. While Mary Tudor burnt poor and humble persons who could be no possible danger to the State because they would not renounce the only form of Christian faith they had ever known, Elizabeth executed for treason powerful and influential men sent by the Pope to kill her. When, after many long years, she reluctantly consented to Mary Stuart's death on the scaffold, Mary had been implicated in a plot to take her life and succeed her as queen. Mary would have made much shorter work of her. If that is called persecution, the word ceases to have any meaning.

Froude quotes with approval, as well he might, the words of Campian's admiring biographer Richard Simpson, himself a Catholic, a most learned and accomplished man. "The eternal truths of Catholicism were made the vehicle for opinions about the authority of the Holy See which could not be held by Englishmen loyal to the Government; and true patriotism united to a false religion overcame the true religion wedded to opinions that were unpatriotic in regard to the liberties of Englishmen, and treasonable to the English Government." In those days there was only one kind of English Government possible; the Government of Elizabeth, Burghley, and Walsingham. Parliamentary Government did not exist. Even the right of free speech in the House of Commons was never recognised by the Queen. If the English Government had fallen, England would have been at the mercy of a Papal legate. Protestantism was synonymous with patriotism, and good Catholics could not be good Englishmen while there was a heretical sovereign on the throne. After the Armada things were different. Spain was crushed. Sixtus V. was not a man to waste money, which he loved, in support of a losing cause. What Froude wrote to establish, and succeeded in establishing, was that between 1529 and 1588 the Reformation saved England from the tyranny of Rome and the proud foot of a Spanish conqueror.

The true hero of Froude's History is not Henry VIII., but Cecil, the firm, incorruptible, sagacious Minister who saved Elizabeth's throne, and made England the leading anti-Catholic country. Of a greater man than Cecil, John Knox, he was however almost an idolater. He considered that Knox surpassed in worldly wisdom even Maitland of Lethington, who was certainly not hampered by theological prejudice. With Puritanism itself he had much natural affinity, and as a determinist the philosophical side of Calvinism attracted him as strongly as it attracted Jonathan Edwards. Froude combined, perhaps illogically, a belief in predestination with a deep sense of moral duty and the responsibility of man. Every reader of his History must have been struck by his respect for all the manly virtues, even in those with whom he has otherwise no sympathy, and his corresponding contempt for weakness and self-indulgence. In his second and final Address to the students of St. Andrews he took Calvinism as his theme.* By this time Froude had acquired a great name, and was known all over the world as the most brilliant of living English historians. Although his uncompromising treatment of Mary Stuart had provoked remonstrance, his eulogy of Knox and Murray was congenial to the Scottish temperament, with which he had much in common. It was indeed from St. Andrews alone that he had hitherto received any public recognition. He was grateful to the students, and gave them of his best, so that this lecture may be taken as an epitome of his moral and religious belief.

— * Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 1-60. —

"Calvinism," he told these lads, "was the spirit which rises in revolt against untruth; the spirit which, as I have shown you, has appeared and reappeared, and in due time will appear again, unless God be a delusion and man be as the beasts that perish. For it is but the inflashing upon the conscience with overwhelming force of the nature and origin of the laws by which mankind are governed—laws which exist, whether we acknowledge them or whether we deny them, and will have their way, to our weal or woe, according to the attitude in which we please to place ourselves towards them—inherent, like electricity, in the nature of things, not made by us, not to be altered by us, but to be discerned and obeyed by us at our everlasting peril." The essence of Froude's belief, not otherwise dogmatic, was a constant sense of God's presence and overruling power. Sceptical his mind in many ways was. The two things he never doubted, and would not doubt, were theism and the moral law. Without God there would be no religion. Without morality there would be no difference between right and wrong. This simple creed was sufficient for him, as it has been sufficient for some of the greatest men who ever lived. Epicureanism in all its forms was alien to his nature. "It is not true," he said at St. Andrews, "that goodness is synonymous with happiness. The most perfect being who ever trod the soil of this planet was called the Man of Sorrows. If happiness means absence of care and inexperience of painful emotion, the best securities for it are a hard heart and a good digestion. If morality has no better foundation than a tendency to promote happiness, its sanction is but a feeble uncertainty." Remembering where he stood, and speaking from the fulness of his mind, Froude exclaimed: "Norman Leslie did not kill Cardinal Beaton down in the castle yonder because he was a Catholic, but because he was a murderer. The Catholics chose to add to their already incredible creed a fresh article, that they were entitled to hang and burn those who differed from them; and in this quarrel the Calvinists, Bible in hand, appealed to the God of battles."

The importance of this striking Address is largely due to the fact that it was composed immediately after the History had been finished, and may be regarded as an epilogue. It breathes the spirit, though it discards the trappings, of Puritanism and the Reformation. Luther "was one of the grandest men that ever lived on earth. Never was any one more loyal to the light that was in him, braver, truer, or wider- minded in the noblest sense of the word." About Calvinism Froude disagreed with Carlyle, who loved to use the old formulas, though he certainly did not use them in the old sense. "It is astonishing to find," Froude wrote to Skelton, "how little in ordinary life the Calvinists talked or wrote about doctrine. The doctrine was never more than the dress. The living creature was wholly moral and political—so at least I think myself." Such language was almost enough to bring John Knox out of his grave. Could he have heard it, he would have felt that he was being confounded with Maitland, who thought God "ane nursery bogill." But though the attempt to represent Knox or Calvin as undogmatic may be fanciful, it is the purest, noblest, and most permanent part of Calvinism that Froude invited the students of St. Andrews to cherish and preserve.

CHAPTER V

FROUDE AND FREEMAN

Froude's reputation as an historian was seriously damaged for a time by the persistent attacks of The Saturday Review. It is difficult for the present generation to understand the influence which that celebrated periodical exercised, or the terror which it inspired, forty years ago. The first editor, Douglas Cook, was a master of his craft, and his colleagues included the most brilliant writers of the day. Matthew Arnold, who was not one of them, paid them the compliment of treating them as the special champions of Philistia, the chosen garrison of Gath. On most subjects they were fairly impartial, holding that there was nothing new and nothing true, and that if there were it wouldn't matter. But the proprietor* of the paper at that time was a High Churchman, and on ecclesiastical questions he put forward his authority. Within that sphere he would not tolerate either neutrality or difference of opinion. To him, and to those who thought like him, Froude's History was anathema. Their detested Reformation was set upon its legs again; Bishop Fisher was removed from his pedestal; the Church of England, which since Keble's assize sermon had been the Church of the Fathers, was shown to be Protestant in its character and Parliamentary in its constitution. The Oxford Movement seemed to be discredited, and that by a man who had once been enlisted in its service. It was necessary that the presumptuous iconoclast should be put down, and taught not to meddle with things which were sacred.

—
* Alexander James Beresford Hope, some time member for the University
of Cambridge.
—

From the first The Saturday Review was hostile, but it was not till 1864 that the campaign became systematic. At that time the editor secured the services of Edward Augustus Freeman, who had been for several years a contributor on miscellaneous topics. Freeman is well known as the historian of the Norman Conquest, as an active politician, controversialist, and pamphleteer. Froude toiled for months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the caligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition assigning his proper share to each. Freeman wrote his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or an original document of any kind. Every historian must take his own line, and the public are concerned not with processes, but with results. I wish merely to point out the fact that, as between Froude and Freeman, the assailed and the assailant, Froude was incomparably the more laborious student of the two. It would be hard to say that one historian should not review the work of another; but we may at least expect that he should do so with sympathetic consideration for the difficulties which all historians encounter, and should not pass sentence until he has all the evidence before him. What were Freeman's qualifications for delivering an authoritative judgment on the work of Froude? Though not by any means so learned a man as his tone of conscious superiority induced people to suppose, he knew his own period very well indeed, and his acquaintance with that period, perhaps also his veneration for Stubbs, had given him a natural prejudice in favour of the Church. For the Church of the middle ages, the undivided Church of Christ, was even in its purely mundane aspect the salvation of society, the safeguard of law and order, the last restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched.

Historically, if not doctrinally, Freeman was a High Churchman, and his ecclesiastical leanings were a great advantage to him in dealing with the eleventh century. It was far otherwise when he came to write of the sixteenth. If the Church of the sixteenth century had been like the Church of the eleventh century, or the twelfth, or the thirteenth, there would have been no Reformation, and no Froude. Freeman lived, and loved, the controversial life. Sharing Gladstone's politics both in Church and State, he was in all secular matters a strong Liberal, and his hatred of Disraeli struck even Liberals as bordering on fanaticism. Yet his hatred of Disraeli was as nothing to his hatred of Froude. By nature "so over-violent or over-civil that every man with him was God or devil," he had erected Froude into his demon incarnate. Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong. He detested Froude's opinions. He could not away with his style. Freeman's own style was forcible, vigorous, rhetorical, hard; the sort of style which Macaulay might have written if he had been a pedant and a professor instead of a politician and a man of the world. It was not ill suited for the blood-and-thunder sort of reviewing to which his nature disposed him, and for the vengeance of the High Churchmen he seemed an excellent tool.

Freeman's biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I think the Dean's conduct was judicious. But there is no reason why a biographer of Froude should follow his example. On the contrary, it is absolutely essential that he should not; for Freeman's assiduous efforts, first in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary, Review, did ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more about Freeman's qualifications for the task which he so lightly and eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of April, 1857 [1867?], "You have found me out about the sixteenth century. I fancy that, from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get credit for knowing more of those times than I do. But one can belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are quite right when you say that I have 'never thrown the whole force of my mind on that portion of history.'"* These words pour a flood of light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade. His object was to belabour Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as he says, "very small," but sufficient for enabling him to dispose satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion, also writing to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, "I find I have a reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of which I am profoundly ignorant."+

— * Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman, vol. i. p. 381. + ibid. p. 382. —

It does not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in The Saturday Review to make people think that, as Froude's critic, he deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private disclaims.

Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After Freeman's death his library was transferred to Owens College, Manchester, and there, among his other books, is his copy of Froude's History. He once said himself, in reference to his criticism of Froude, "In truth there is no kind of temper in the case, but a strong sense of amusement in bowling down one thing after another." Let us see. Here are some extracts from his marginal notes. "A lie, teste Stubbs," as if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original documents. Another entry is "Beast," and yet another is "Bah!" "May I live to embowel James Anthony Froude" is the pious aspiration with which he has adorned another page. "Can Froude understand honesty?" asks this anxious inquirer; and again, "Supposing Master Froude were set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write paradoxes, would he not curse his day?" Along with such graceful compliments as "You've found that out since you wrote a book against your own father," "Give him as slave to Thirlwall," there may be seen the culminating assertion, "Froude is certainly the vilest brute that ever wrote a book." Yet there was "no kind of temper in the case," and "only a strong sense of amusement." I suppose it must have amused Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have been a very bad temper indeed.

In this judicial frame of mind did Freeman set himself to review successive volumes of Froude's Elizabeth. Froude did not always correct his proofs with mechanical accuracy, and this gave Freeman an advantage of which he was not slow to avail himself. "Mr. Froude," he says in The Saturday Review for the 30th of January, 1864, "talks of a French attack on Guienne, evidently meaning Guisnes. It is hardly possible that this can be a misprint." It was of course a misprint, and could hardly have been anything else. Guisnes was a town, and could be attacked. Guienne was a province, and would have been invaded. Guienne had been a French province since the Hundred Years' War, and therefore the French would neither have attacked nor invaded it. As if all this were not enough to show the nature and source of the error, the word was correctly printed in the marginal heading. In the same article, after quoting Froude's denial that a sentence described by the Spanish Ambassador de Silva as having been passed upon a pirate could have been pronounced in an English court of justice, Freeman asked, "Is it possible that Mr. Froude has never heard of the peine forte et dure?" Freeman of course knew it to be impossible. He knew also that the peine forte et dure was inflicted for refusing to plead, and that this pirate, by de Silva's own account, had been found guilty. But he wanted to suggest that Froude was an ignoramus, and for the purpose of beating a dog one stick is as good as another.

Freeman's trump card, however, was the Bishop of Lexovia, and that brilliant victory he never forgot. Froude examined the strange and startling allegation, cited by Macaulay in his introductory chapter, that during the reign of Henry VIII. seventy-two thousand persons perished by the hand of the public executioner. He traced it to the Commentaries of Cardan, an astrologer, not a very trustworthy authority, who had himself heard it, he said, from "an unknown Bishop of Lexovia." "Unknown," observed Freeman, with biting sarcasm, "to no one who has studied the history of Julius Caesar or of Henry II." Froude had not been aware that Lexovia was the ancient name for the modern Lisieux, and for twenty years he was periodically reminded of the fact. Had he followed Freeman's methods, he might have asked whether his critic really supposed that there were bishops in the time of Julius Caesar. Freeman failed to see that the point was not the modern name of Lexovia, but the number of persons put to death by Henry, on which Froude had shown the worthlessness of popular tradition.

Bishop Hooper was burnt at Gloucester in the Cathedral Close. Froude describes the scene of the execution as "an open space opposite the College." That shows, says Freeman, that Froude did not, like Macaulay, visit the scenes of the events he described. Perhaps he did not visit Gloucester, or even Guisnes. That Freeman's general conclusion was entirely wide of the mark a single letter from Froude to Skelton is enough to show. "I want you some day," he wrote on the 12th of December, 1863, "to go with me to Loch Leven, and then to Stirling, Perth, and Glasgow. Before I go farther I must have a personal knowledge of Loch Leven Castle and the grounds at Langside. Also I must look at the street at Linlithgow where Murray was shot."* Thus Freeman's amiable inference was the exact reverse of the truth.

— * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 131. —

Some of Freeman's methods, however, were a good deal less scrupulous than this. By way of bringing home to Froude "ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind," he cited the case of Bishop Coxe. "To Hatton," Froude wrote in his text,+ "was given also the Naboth's vineyard of his neighbour the Bishop of Ely." In a long note he commented upon the Bishop's inclination to resist, and showed how the "proud prelate" was "brought to reason by means so instructive on Elizabeth's mode of conducting business when she had not Burghley or Walsingham to keep her in order that" the whole account is given at length in the words of Lord North, whom she employed for the purpose. This letter from Lord North is extremely valuable evidence. Froude read it and transcribed it from the collection of manuscripts at Hatfield. As an idle rumour that Froude spent only one day at Hatfield obtained currency after his death, it may be convenient to mention here that the work which he did there in copying manuscripts alone must have occupied him at least a month. Now let us see what use Freeman made of the information thus given him by Froude. "Meanwhile," he says in The Saturday Review for the 22nd of January, 1870, "Mr. Froude is conveniently silent as to the infamous tricks played by Elizabeth and her courtiers in order to make estates for court favourites out of Episcopal lands. A line or two of text is indeed given to the swindling transaction by which Bishop Coxe of Ely was driven to surrender his London house to Sir Christopher Hatton. But why? Because the story gives Mr. Froude an opportunity of quoting at full length a letter from Lord North to the Bishop in which all the Bishop's real or pretended enormities are strongly set forth." Here follows a short extract from the letter, in which North accused Coxe of grasping covetousness. Now it is perfectly obvious to any one having the whole letter before him, as Freeman had, that Froude quoted it with the precisely opposite aim of denouncing the conduct of Elizabeth to the Bishop, whom he compares with Naboth. Freeman must have heard of Naboth. He must have known what Froude meant. Yet the whole effect of his comments must have been to make the readers of The Saturday Review think that Froude was attacking the Church, when he was attacking the Crown for its conduct to the Church.

— + History of England, vol. xi. p. 321. —

Freeman seemed to glory in his own deficiencies, and was almost as proud of what he did not know as of what he did. Thus, for instance, Froude, a born man of letters, was skilful and accomplished in the employment of metaphors. Freeman could no more handle a metaphor than he could fish with a dry fly. He therefore, without the smallest consciousness of being absurd, condemned Froude for doing what he was unable to do himself, and even wrote, in the name of The Saturday Review, "We are no judges of metaphors," though there must surely have been some one on the staff who knew something about them.

Froude had a mode of treating documents which is open to animadversion. He did not, as Mr. Pollard happily puts it in the Dictionary of National Biography, "respect the sanctity of inverted commas." They ought to imply textual quotation, Froude used them for his abridgments, openly proclaiming the fact that he had abridged, and therefore deceiving no one. Freeman's comment upon this irregularity is extremely characteristic. "Now we will not call this dishonest; we do not believe that Mr. Froude is intentionally dishonest in this or any other matter; but then it is because he does not know what literary honesty and dishonesty are." There is no such thing as literary honesty, or scientific honesty, or political honesty. There is only one kind of honesty, and an honest man does not misrepresent an opponent, as Freeman misrepresented Froude. To call a man a liar is an insult. To say that is not a liar because he does not know the difference between truth and falsehood is a cowardly insult. But Froude was soon avenged. Freeman gave himself into his adversary's hands. "Sometimes," he wrote,* "Mr. Froude gives us the means of testing him. Let us try a somewhat remarkable passage. He tells us "It had been argued in the Admiralty Courts that the Prince of Orange, 'having his principality of his title in France, might make lawful war against the Duke of Alva,* and that the Queen would violate the rules of neutrality if she closed her ports against his cruisers." Then follows a Latin passage from which the English is paraphrased. "We presume," continues Freeman in fancied triumph, "that the words put by Mr. Froude in inverted commas are not Lord Burghiey's summary of the Latin extract in the note, but Mr. Froude's own, for it is utterly impossible that Burghley could have so misconceived a piece of plain Latin, or have so utterly misunderstood the position of any contemporary prince." Presumption indeed. I have before me a photograph of Burghley's own words in his own writing examined by Froude at the Rolls House. They are "Question whether the Prince of Orange, being a free prince of the Empire, and also having his principality of his title in France, might not make a just war against the Duke of Alva." Froude abridged, and wrote "lawful" for "just." But the words which Freeman says that Burghley could not have used are the words which he did use, and the explanation is simple enough. Freeman was Freeman. Burghley was a statesman. Burghley of course knew perfectly well that Orange was not subject to the King of France, not part of his dominions, which is Freeman's objection. He called it in France because it, and the Papal possessions of Venaissin adjoining it, were surrounded by French territory. He called it "in France," as we should call the Republic of San Marino "in Italy" now. Freeman might have ascertained what Burghley did write if he had cared to know. He did not care to know. He was "belabouring Froude."

— * Saturday Review, Nov. 24th, 1866. —

Once Froude was weak enough to accept Freeman's correction on a small point, only to find that Freeman was entirely in error, and that he himself had been right all along. After much vituperative language not worth repeating, Freeman wrote in The Saturday Review for the 5th of February, 1870, these genial words, "As it is, there is nothing to be done but to catch Mr. Froude whenever he comes from his hiding- place at Simancas into places in which we can lie in wait for him." The sneer at original research is characteristic of Freeman. One can almost hear his self-satisfied laugh as he wrote this unlucky sentence, "The thing is too grotesque to talk about seriously; but can we trust a single uncertified detail from the hands of a man who throughout his story of the Armada always calls the Ark Royal the Ark Raleigh? … It is the sort of blunder which so takes away one's breath that one thinks for the time that it must be right. We do not feel satisfied till we have turned to our Camden and seen 'Ark Regis' staring us full in the face." Freeman did not know the meaning of historical research as conducted by a real scholar like Froude. Froude had not gone to Camden, who in Freeman's eyes represented the utmost stretch of Elizabethan learning. If Freeman had had more natural shrewdness, it might have occurred to him that the name of a great seaman was not an unlikely name for a ship. But he could never fall lightly, and heavily indeed did he fall on this occasion. With almost incredible fatuity, he wrote, "The puzzle of guessing how Mr. Froude got at so grotesque a union of words as 'Ark Raleigh' fades before the greater puzzle of guessing what idea he attached to the words 'Ark Raleigh' when he had got them together." When Freeman was most hopelessly wrong he always began to parody Macaulay. Corruptio optimi pessima. "Ark Raleigh" means Raleigh's ship, and Froude took the name, "Ark Rawlie" as it was then spelt, from the manuscripts at the Rolls House. He was of course right, and Freeman was wrong. But that is not all. Freeman could easily have put himself right if he had chosen to take the trouble. Edwards's Life of Raleigh appeared in 1868, and a copy of it is in Freeman's library at Owens College. Edwards gives an account of the Ark Raleigh, which was built for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh advancing two hundred pounds. Freeman, however, need not have read this book to find out the truth. For "the Ark Raleigh" occurs fourteen times in a Calendar of Manuscripts from 1581 to 1590, published by Robert Lemon in 1865. When Freeman was brought to book, and taxed with this gross blunder, he pleaded that he "did a true verdict give according to such evidence as came before him." The implied analogy is misleading. Jurymen are bound by their oaths, and by their duty, to find a verdict one way or the other. Freeman was under no obligation to say anything about the Ark Raleigh. Prudence and ignorance might well have restrained his pen.

Two blots in Froude's History Freeman may, I think, be acknowledged to have hit. One was intellectual; the other was moral. It was pure childishness to suggest that Froude had never heard of the peine forte et dure, and only invincible prejudice could have dictated such a sentence as "That Mr. Froude's law would be queer might be taken as a matter of course."* Still, it is true, and a serious misfortune, that Froude took very little interest in legal and constitutional questions. For, while they had not the same importance in the sixteenth century as they had in the seventeenth, they cannot be disregarded to the extent in which Froude disregarded them without detracting from the value of his book as a whole. He did not sit down, like Hallam, to write a constitutional history, and he could not be expected to deal with his subject from that special point of view. Freeman's complaint, which is quite just, was that he neglected almost entirely the relations of the Crown with the Houses of Parliament and with the courts of law. The moral blot accounts for a good deal of the indignation which Froude excited in minds far less jaundiced than Freeman's. No one hated injustice more than Froude. But cruelty as such did not inspire him with any horror. No punishment, however atrocious, seemed to him too great for persons clearly guilty of enormous crimes. I have already referred to his defence of the horrible Boiling Act which disgraced the reign and the parliament of Henry VIII. The account of Mary Stuart's old and wizened face as it appeared when her false hair and front had been removed after her execution may be set down as an error of taste. But what is to be said, on the score of humanity, for an historian who in the nineteenth century calmly and in cold blood defended the use of the rack? Even here Freeman's ingenuity of suggestion did not desert him. After quoting part, and part only, of Froude's sinister apology, he writes, "To all this the answer is very simple. Every time that Elizabeth and her counsellors sent a prisoner to the rack they committed a breach of the law of England."+ Any one who read this article without reading the History would infer that Froude had maintained the legality, as well as the expediency, of torture. That is not true. What Froude says is, "A practice which by the law was always forbidden could be palliated only by a danger so great that the nation had become like an army in the field. It was repudiated on the return of calmer times, and the employment of it rests a stain on the memory of those by whom it was used. It is none the less certain, however, that the danger was real and terrible, and the same causes which relieve a commander in active service from the restraints of the common law apply to the conduct of statesmen who are dealing with organised treason. The law is made for the nation, not the nation for the law. Those who transgress it do it at their own risk, but they may plead circumstances at the bar of history, and have a right to be heard." Thus Froude asserts as strongly and clearly as Freeman himself that torture was in 1580, and always had been, contrary to the law of England. On the purely legal and technical aspect of the question a point might be raised which neither Froude nor Freeman has attempted to solve. Would any Court in the reign of Elizabeth have convicted a man of a criminal offence for carrying out the express commands of the sovereign? If not, in what sense was the racking of the Jesuits illegal? But there is a law of God, as well as a law of man, and surely Elizabeth broke it. Froude's argument seems to prove too much, if it proves anything, for it would justify all the worst cruelties ever inflicted by tyrants for political objects, from the burning of Christians who refused incense for the Roman Emperor to Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel.

—
* Saturday Review, Jan. 29th, 1870.
+ Saturday Review, Dec. 1st, 1867.
—

The analogy of a commander in active service is inadequate. Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with him in 1586. "They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due precautions for the protraction of the pain. If it was to be taken as part of the Catholic creed that to kill a prince in the interests of Holy Church was an act of piety and merit, stern English common sense caught the readiest means of expressing its opinion on the character both of the creed and its professors."

Stern English common sense! To suggest that the English people had anything to do with it is a libel on the English nation. Elizabeth had the decency to forbid the repetition of such atrocities. That she should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude's.

On the 12th of January, 1870, Freeman delivered in The Saturday Review his final verdict on Froude's History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is one of the most preposterous judgments that ever found their way into print. In knowledge of the subject, and in patient assiduity of research, Froude was immeasurably Freeman's superior, and his life had been devoted to historic studies. Yet this was the language in which the editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died: "He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name has come to be used as a figure of speech, sometimes in strange company with his betters …. But an historian he is not; four volumes of ingenious paradox, eight volumes of ecclesiastical pamphlet, do not become a history, either because of the mere number of volumes, or because they contain a narrative which gradually shrinks into little more than a narrative of diplomatic intrigues. The main objections to Mr. Froude's book, the blemishes which cut it off from any title to the name of history, are utter carelessness as to facts and utter incapacity to distinguish right from wrong …. That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth—the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the name, cannot be written—is not in Mr. Froude's nature, and it would probably be impossible to make him understand what it is …. How far the success of the book is due to its inherent vices, how far to its occasional virtues, is a point too knotty for us to solve. The general reader and his tastes—why this thing pleases him and the other thing displeases him—have ever been to us the proroundest of mysteries. It is enough that on Mr. Froude's book, as a whole, the verdict of all competent historical scholars has long ago been given. Occasional beauties of style and narrative cannot be allowed to redeem carelessness of truth, ignorance of law, contempt for the first principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre de bonne foy.'"*

— * The Duke was not, as Freeman implies that he was, referring to Froude. —

By a curious irony of fate or circumstance Freeman has unconsciously depicted the frame of mind in which Froude approached historic problems. "That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth—the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the name, cannot be written," was the dominant principle of Froude's life and work. He had hitherto taken no notice of the attacks in The Saturday Review. The errors pointed out in them were of the most trivial kind, and mere abuse is not worth a reply. But even Gibbon was moved from his philosophic calm when Mr. Somebody of Something "presumed to attack not the faith but the fidelity of the historian." Froude passed over in contemptuous silence impertinent reflections upon his religious belief. His honesty was now in set terms impugned, and on the 15th of February, 1870, he addressed, through the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Frederick Greenwood, a direct challenge to Mr. Philip Harwood, who had become editor of The Saturday Review. After a few caustic remarks upon the absurdity of the defects imputed to him, such as ignorance that Parliament could pass Bills of Attainder, because he had said that the House of Lords would not pass one in a particular case, he came to close quarters with the imputation of bad faith. "I am," he said, "peculiarly situated"—as Freeman of course knew—"towards a charge of this kind, for nine-tenths of my documents are in manuscript, and a large proportion of those manuscripts are in Spain. To deal as fairly as I can with the public, I have all along deposited my Spanish transcripts, as soon as I have done with them, in the British Museum. The reading of manuscripts, however, is at best laborious. The public may be inclined to accept as proved an uncontradicted charge, the value of which they cannot readily test. I venture therefore to make the following proposal. I do not make it to my reviewer. He will be reluctant to exchange communications with me, and the disinclination will not be on his side only. I address myself to his editor. If the editor will select any part of my volumes, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred pages, wherever he pleases, I am willing to subject them to a formal examination by two experts, to be chosen—if Sir Thomas Hardy will kindly undertake it—by the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records. They shall go through my references, line for line. They shall examine every document to which I have alluded, and shall judge whether I have dealt with it fairly. I lay no claim to be free from mistakes. I have worked in all through nine hundred volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and official, in five languages and in difficult handwritings. I am not rash enough to say that I have never misread a word, or overlooked a passage of importance. I profess only to have dealt with my materials honestly to the best of my ability. I submit myself to a formal trial, of which I am willing to bear the entire expense, on one condition-that the report, whatever it be, shall be published word for word in The Saturday Review."

The proposal was certainly a novel one, and could not in ordinary circumstances have been accepted. But it is also novel to charge an historian of the highest character and repute with inability to speak the truth, or to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman, signing himself "Mr. Froude's Saturday Reviewer," replied in The Pall Mall Gazette. The challenge he left to the editor of The Saturday, who contemptuously refused it, and he admitted that after all Froude probably did know what a Bill of Attainder was. The rest of his letter is a shuffle. "I have made no charge of bad faith against Mr. Froude"—whom he had accused of not knowing what truth meant—"with regard to any Spanish manuscripts, or any other manuscripts. All that I say is, that as I find gross inaccuracies in Mr. Froude's book, which he does not whenever I have the means of testing him which was certainly not often—"I think there is a presumption against his accuracy in those parts where I have not the means of testing him. But this is only a presumption, and not proof. Mr. Froude may have been more careful, or more lucky"—meaning less fraudulent, or more skilful—"with the hidden wealth of Simancas than he has been with regard to materials which are more generally accessible. I trust it may prove so." If Freeman thought that he meant that, he must have had singular powers of self-deception. "I have been twitted by men of thought and learning"—whom he does not name—"for letting Mr. Froude off too easily, and I am inclined to plead guilty to the charge. I do not suppose that Mr. Froude wilfully misrepresents anything; the fault seems to be inherent and incurable; he does not know what historical truth is, or how a man should set about looking for it. As therefore his book is not written with that regard for truth with which a book ought to be written, I hold that I am justified in saying that it is not 'un livre de bonne roy.'"

It is difficult to read this disingenuous farrago of insinuation even now without a strong sense of moral contempt. But vengeance was coming, and before many years were over his head Freeman had occasion to remember the Hornfinn tag:

Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Froude himself took the matter very lightly. He had boldly offered the fullest inquiry, and Freeman had not been clever enough to shelter himself behind the plea that copies were not originals; he did not know enough about manuscripts to think of it. The blunders he had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved Derreen.* "I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book- twelve volumes—about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not dotted and t's not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity has discovered. Every one of the rascals has made a dozen blunders of his own, too, while detecting one of mine." Skelton's own testimony is worth citing, for, though a personal friend, he was a true scholar. "We must remember that he was to some extent a pioneer, and that he was the first (for instance) to utilise the treasures of Simancas. He transcribed, from the Spanish, masses of papers which even a Spaniard could have read with difficulty, and I am assured that his translations (with rare exceptions) render the original with singular exactness."+ And in the preface to his Maitland of Lethington the same distinguished author says, "Only the man or woman who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish material in the Record Office can properly appreciate Mr. Froude's inexhaustible industry and substantial accuracy. His point of view is very different from mine; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the intricacies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled." John Hill Burton, to whose learning and judgment Freeman's were as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine, concurred in Skelton's view, and no one has ever known Scottish history better than Burton.

—
* June 21st, 1870.
+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 143.
—

Freeman's reckless and unscholarly attacks upon Froude produced no effect upon his own master Stubbs, whom he was always covering with adulation. From the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1876 Stubbs pronounced Froude's "great book," as he called it, to be "a work of great industry, power, and importance." Stubbs was as far as possible from agreeing with Froude in opinion. An orthodox Churchman and a staunch Tory, he never varied in his opposition to Liberalism, as well ecclesiastical as political, and he had no sympathy with the reformers. But his simple, manly, pious character was incapable of supporting his cause by personal slander. Unlike Freeman, he had a rich vein of racy humour, which he indulged in a famous epigram on Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation. But he could appreciate Froude's learning and industry, for he was a real student himself.

The controversy between Froude and Freeman, however, was by no means at an end, and I may as well proceed at once to the conclusion of it, chronology notwithstanding. In the year 1877, Froude contributed to The Nineteenth Century a series of papers on the Life and Times of Thomas Becket, since republished in the fourth volume of his Short Studies. Full of interesting information, the result of minute pains, and excellent in style, they make no pretence to be, as the History was, a work of original research. They are indeed founded upon the Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, which Canon Robertson had edited for the Master of the Rolls in the previous year. They were of course read by every one, because they were written by Froude, whereas Robertson's learned Introduction would only have been read by scholars. Froude's conclusions were much the same as the erudite Canon's. He did not pretend to know the twelfth century as he knew the sixteenth, and he avowedly made use of another man's knowledge to point his favourite moral that emancipation from ecclesiastical control was a necessary stage in the development of English freedom. He may have been unconsciously affected by his familiarity with the quarrel between Wolsey and Henry VIII. in describing the quarrel between Becket and Henry II. The Church of the middle ages discharged invaluable functions which in later times were more properly undertaken by the State. Froude sided with Henry, and showed, as he had not much difficulty in showing, that there were a good many spots on the robe of Becket's saintliness. The immunity of Churchmen, that is, of clergymen, from the jurisdiction of secular tribunals was not conducive either to morality or to order.

Froude's essays might have been forgotten, like other brilliant articles in other magazines, if Freeman had let them alone. But the spectacle of Froude presuming to write upon those earlier periods of which The Saturday Review had so often and so dogmatically pronounced him to be ignorant, drove Freeman into print. If he had disagreed with Froude on the main question, the only question which matters now, he would have been justified, and more than justified, in setting out the opposite view. A defence of Becket against Henry, of the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer, would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as Froude's own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and Erastianism. There is a great deal more to be said for Becket than for Wolsey; and though Freeman found it difficult to state any case with temperance, he could have stated this case with power. But, much as he disliked Froude, he agreed with him. "Looking," he wrote, "at the dispute between Henry and Thomas by the light of earlier and of later ages, we see that the cause of Henry was the right one; that is, we see that it was well that the cause of Henry triumphed in the long run." Nevertheless he rushed headlong upon his victim, and "belaboured" Froude, with all the violence of which he was capable, in The Contemporary Review. Hitherto his attacks had been anonymous. Now for the first time he came into the open, and delivered his assault in his own name. Froude's forbearance, as well as his own vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring. The first sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance. "Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the Rolls Series. That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique. For Froude's style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to Freeman, "had," as he kindly admitted, "its merits." Page after page teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings. "On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of More and Fisher"; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question not of morality, but of evidence. "Mr. Froude by his own statement has not made history the study of his life," which was exactly what he had done, and stated that he had done. "The man who insisted on the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill of Attainder."

Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page. Immediately after charging Froude with "fanatical hatred towards the English Church, reformed or unreformed"—though he was the great champion of the Reformation—"a degree of hatred which must be peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"- like Freeman's bosom friend Green—he says that Froude "never reaches so high a point as in several passages where he describes various scenes and features of monastic life." But this could not absolve him from having made a "raid" upon another man's period, from being a "marauder," from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have written about, though he had not. Froude had "an inborn and incurable twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement about any matter." "By some destiny which it would seem that he cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds—at least which all other readers find—in his book he invariably substitutes another narrative out of his own head." "Very few of us can test manuscripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment's notice test references to manuscripts much nearer home." This is a strange insinuation from a man who never tested a manuscript, seldom, if ever, consulted a manuscript, and had declined Froude's challenge to let his copies be compared with his abridgment. One grows tired of transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes. Yet it is essential to clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge between Froude and his life-long enemy.

The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude's articles in The Nineteenth Century was fantastic. "Emperors and Popes, Sicilian Kings and Lombard Commonwealths, should be as familiar to him who would write The Life and Times of Thomas Becket as the text of the Constitutions of Clarendon or the relations between the Sees of Canterbury and York." If Froude had written an elaborate History of Henry II., as he wrote a History of Henry VIII., he would have qualified himself in the manner somewhat bombastically described. But even Lord Acton, who seemed to think that he could not write about anything until he knew everything, would scarcely have prepared himself for an article in The Nineteenth Century by mastering the history of the world. And if Froude had done so, it would have profited him little. He would have forgotten it, "with that calm oblivion of facts which distinguishes him from all other men who have taken on themselves to read past events." He would still have written "whatever first came into his head, without stopping to see whether a single fact bore his statements out or not." "Accurate statement of what really happened, even though such accurate statement might serve Mr. Froude's purpose, is clearly forbidden by the destiny which guides Mr. Froude's literary career." These extracts from The Contemporary Review are samples, and only samples, from a mass of rhetoric not unworthy of the grammarian who prayed for the damnation of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of irregular verbs. Freeman, whose self-assertion was perpetual, represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of truth. His own reverence for truth he illustrated quaintly enough at the close of his last article. "I leave others to protest," said this veracious critic, "against Mr. Froude's treatment of the sixteenth century. I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from original sources." I leave others to protest! From 1864 to 1870 Freeman had continuously attacked successive volumes of Froude's History in The Saturday Review. Yet he here makes in his own name a statement quite irreconcilable with his ever having done anything of the kind, and accompanies it with an admission which, if it had been made in The Saturday Review, would have robbed his invective of more than half its sting.

And now let us see what was the real foundation for this imposing fabric. Freeman's boisterous truculence made such a deafening noise, and raised such a blinding dust, that it takes some little time and trouble to discover the hollowness of the charges. With four-fifths of Froude's narrative he does not deal at all, except to borrow from it for his own purposes, as he used to borrow from the History in The Saturday Review. In the other fifth, the preliminary pages, he discovered two misprints of names, one mistake of fact, and three or four exaggerations. Not one of these errors is so grave as his own statement, picked up from some bad lawyer, that "the preamble of an Act of Parliament need not be received as of any binding effect." The preamble is part of the Act, and gives the reasons why the Act was passed. Of course the rules of grammar show that being explanatory it is not an operative part; but it can be quoted in any court of justice to explain the meaning of the clauses.

In his Annals of an English Abbey Froude allowed "Robert Fitzwilliam" to pass for Robert Fitzwalter in his proofs, and upon this conclusive evidence that Froude was unfit to write history Freeman pounced with triumphant exultation. He had some skill in the correction of misprints, and would have been better employed in revising proof- sheets for Froude than in "belabouring" him. Froude said that Becket's name "denoted Saxon extraction." An anonymous biographer, not always accurate, says that both his parents came from Normandy. It is probable, though by no means certain, that in this case the biographer was right, and Froude corrected the mistake when, in consequence of Freeman's criticisms, he republished the articles. Froude, on the authority of Edward Grim, who knew Becket, and wrote his Life, referred to the cruelty and ferocity of Becket's administration as Chancellor. Freeman declared that "anything more monstrous never appeared from the pen of one who professed to be narrating facts." Froude not only "professed" to be narrating facts: he was narrating them. The only question is whether they happened in England, in Toulouse, or in Aquitaine. Freeman exposed his own ignorance by alleging that Grim meant the suppression of the free lances, which happened before Becket became Chancellor. He did not in fact know the subject half so well as Froude, though Froude might have more carefully qualified his general words. Froude's account of Becket's appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, his scruples, and how he overcame them, is described by Freeman as "pure fiction." It was taken from William of Canterbury, and, though open to doubt upon some points, is quite as likely to be true as the narrative preferred by Freeman. The most serious error, indeed the only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement that Becket's murderers were shielded from punishment by the King. Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop. It is doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of Becket's assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether. Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly wrong.

But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce. He stooped to write the words, "Natural kindliness, if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost forgotten fame." The meaning of this sentence, so far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends published after his own premature death. If Froude had written anonymously against this work, the phrase "stabs in the dark" would have been intelligible. As he had written in his own name, and had not mentioned his brother's work at all, part at least of the accusation was transparently and obviously false.

At last, however, Freeman had gone too far. Froude had borne a great deal, he could bear no more; and he took up a weapon which Freeman never forgot. I can well recall, as can hundreds of others, the appearance in The Nineteenth Century for April, 1879, of "A Few Words on Mr. Freeman." They were read with a sense of general pleasure and satisfaction, a boyish delight in seeing a big bully well thrashed before the whole school. Froude was so calm, so dignified, so self- restrained, so consciously superior to his rough antagonist in temper and behaviour. Only once did he show any emotion. It was when he spoke of the dastardly attempt to strike him through the memory of his brother. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any person—not one—in whom, as I now think of him, the excellences of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure. Of my personal feeling towards him I cannot speak. I am ashamed to have been compelled, by what I can only describe as an inexcusable insult, to say what I have said." It was not difficult to show that Freeman's four articles in The Contemporary Review contained worse blunders than any he had attributed to Froude, as, for instance, the allegation that Henry VIII., who founded bishoprics and organised the defence of the country, squandered away all that men before his time had agreed to respect. Easy also was it to disprove the charge of "hatred towards the English Church at all times and under all characters" by the mere mention of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and Hooper. The statement that Froude had been a "fanatical votary" of the mediaeval Church was almost delicious in the extravagance of its absurdity; and it would have been impossible better to retort the wild charges of misrepresentation, in which it is hard to suppose that even Freeman himself believed, than by the simple words, "It is true that I substitute a story in English for a story in Latin, a short story for a long one, and a story in a popular form for a story in a scholastic one." In short, Froude wrote a style which every scholar loves, and every pedant hates. With a light touch, but a touch which had a sting, Froude disposed of the nonsense which made him translate praedictae rationes "shortened rations" instead of "the foregoing accounts," and in a graver tone he reminded the public that his offer to test the accuracy of his extracts from unprinted authorities had been refused. Graver still, and not without indignation, is his reference to Freeman's suggestion that he thought the Cathedral Church of St. Albans had been destroyed. Most people, when they finished Froude's temperate but crushing refutation, must have felt the opportunity for it should ever surprised that have arisen.

Froude had done his work at last, and done it thoroughly. Freeman's plight was not to be envied. If his offence had been rank, his punishment had been tremendous. Even The Spectator, which had hitherto upheld him through thick and thin, admonished him that he had passed the bounds of decency and infringed the rules of behaviour. Dreading a repetition of the penalty if he repeated the offence, fearing that silence would imply acquiescence in charges of persistent calumny, he blurted out a kind of awkward half-apology. He confessed, in The Contemporary Review for May, 1879, that he had criticised in The Saturday all the volumes of Froude's Elizabeth. This self-constituted champion proceeded to say that he knew nothing about Froude's personal character, and that when he accused Froude of stabbing his dead brother "in the dark" he only meant that the brother was dead. When he says that Froude's article was "plausible, and more than plausible," he is quite right. It is more than plausible, because it is true. After vainly trying to explain away some of the errors brought home to him by Froude, and leaving others unnoticed, he complains, with deep and obvious sincerity, that Froude had not read his books, nor even his articles in Encyclopaedias. He exhibits a striking instance of his own accuracy. In his defence against the rather absurd charge of not going, as Macaulay had gone, to see the places about which he wrote, Froude pleaded want of means. Freeman rejoined that Macaulay was at one time of his life "positively poor." He was so for a very short time when his Fellowship at Trinity came to an end. Unluckily for Freeman's statement the period was before his appointment to be Legal Member of Council in India, and long before he had begun to write his History of England. The most charitable explanation of an erroneous statement is usually the correct one, and it was probably forgetfulness which made Freeman say that he did not hear of Froude's having placed copies of the Simancas manuscripts in the British Museum till 1878, whereas he had himself discussed it in The Pall Mall Gazette eight years before. If Froude had made such an astonishing slip, there would have been more ground for imputing to him an incapacity to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman's "Last Words on Mr. Froude" show no sign of penitence or good feeling, and they end with characteristic bluster about the truth, from which he had so grievously departed. But Froude was never troubled with him again.

Although a refuted detractor is not formidable in the flesh, the evil that he does lives after him. Freeman's view of Froude is not now held by any one whose opinion counts; yet still there seems to rise, as from a brazen head of Ananias, dismal and monotonous chaunt, "He was careless of the truth, he did not make history the business of his life." He did make history the business of his life, and he cared more for truth than for anything else in the world. Freeman's biographer has given no clue to his imperfect sympathy with Froude. Green, true historian as he was, made more mistakes than Froude, and the mistakes he did make were more serious. He trespassed on the preserves of Brewer, who criticised him severely without deviating from the standard of a Christian and a gentleman. Even over the domain of Stubbs, and the consecrated ground of the Norman Conquest itself, Green ranged without being Freemanised as a poacher. But then Green was Freeman's personal friend, and in friendship Freeman was staunch. They belonged to the same set, and no one was more cliquish than Freeman. Liberal as he was in politics, he always professed the utmost contempt for the general public, and wondered what guided their strange tastes in literature. Dean Stephens has apparently suppressed most of the references to Froude in Freeman's private letters, and certainly he drops no hint of the controversy about Becket. But the following passage from his "Concluding Survey" is apparently aimed at Froude. Freeman, we are told, "was unable to write or speak politely"—and if the Dean had stopped there I should have had nothing to say; but he goes on—"of any one who pretended to more knowledge than he really had, or who enjoyed a reputation for learning which was undeserved; nay, more, he considered it to be a positive duty to expose such persons. In doing this he was often no doubt too indifferent to their feelings, and employed language of unwarranted severity which provoked angry retaliation, and really weakened the effect of his criticism, by diverting public sympathy from himself to the object of his attack. But it was quite a mistake to suppose, as many did, that his fierce utterances were the outcome of ill-temper or of personal animosity. He entertained no ill-will whatever towards literary or political opponents."

There is more to the same effect, and of course Froude must have been in Stephens's mind. But the reputation of a great historian is not to be taken away by hints. It may suit Freeman's admirers to seek refuge in meaningless generalities. Those who are grateful for Froude's services to England, and to literature, have no interest in concealment. Froude never "pretended to more knowledge than he really had." So far from "enjoying a reputation for learning which was undeserved," he disguised his learning rather than displayed it, and wore it lightly, a flower. That Freeman should have "considered it to be a positive duty to expose" a man whose knowledge was so much wider and whose industry was so much greater than his own is strange. That he did his best for years, no doubt from the highest motives, to damage Froude's reputation, and to injure his good name, is certain. With the general reader he failed. The public had too much sense to believe Froude was merely, or chiefly, or at all, an ecclesiastical pamphleteer. But by dint of noisy assertion, and perpetual repetition, Freeman did at last infect academic coteries with the idea that Froude was a superficial sciolist. The same thing had been said of Macaulay, and believed by the same sort of people. Froude's books were certainly much easier to read than Freeman's. Must they therefore have been much easier to write? Two-thirds of Froude's mistakes would have been avoided, and Freeman would never have had his chance, if the former had had a keener eye for slips in his proof-sheets, or had engaged competent assistance. When he allowed Wilhelmus to be printed instead of Willelmus, Freeman shouted with exultant glee that a man so hopelessly ignorant of mediaeval nomenclature had no right to express an opinion upon the dispute between Becket and the King. Nothing could exceed his transports of joy when he found out that Froude did not know the ancient name of Lisieux. Freeman thought, like the older Pharisees, that he should be heard for his much speaking, and for a time he was. People did not realise that so many confident allegations could be made in which there was no substance at all. They thought themselves safe in making allowance for Freeman's exaggeration, and Freeman simply bored many persons into accepting his estimate of Froude. Perhaps he went a little too far when he claimed to have found inaccuracies in Froude's transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without knowing a word of Spanish. But he was seldom so frank as that. It was not often that he forgot his two objects of holding up Froude as the fluent, facile ignoramus, and himself as the profound, erudite student.

Just after reading Freeman's furious articles on Becket, I turned to Froude's "Index of Papers collected by me October, November, and December, 1856." It covers twenty-one pages, very closely written, and I will give a few extracts to show what sort of preparation this sciolist thought necessary for his ecclesiastical pamphlet. The first entry, representing four pages of text, is "Hanson's Description of England. Diet, habits, prices of provisions from Parliamentary History." Another is "Dress and loose habits of the London clergy in 1486. From Morton's Injunctions."

"State of the Abbey of St. Albans in 1489 shows that Froude was well acquainted with that subject many years before he wrote his Short Study on it. "The Bishops of all the Sees in England under Henry, date of appointment, etc.," is another of these items, which also comprise "Extracts from the so-called Privy Purse Expenses of Henry VIII." "Bulla Clementis Papae VII. concessa Regi Henrico de Secundis nuptiis. This contains the passage quocunque licito vel illicito coitu." "Petition of the Upper House of Convocation for the suppression of heretical books." "Royal Letter on the Articles of 1536 which were written, Henry says, by himself." "Elaborate and extremely valuable State Papers on the Duchy of Milan, and the dispute between the Emperor and Francis I." "Pole to James, the Fifth Letter of Warning." "Pole to the Pope, May 18th, 1537. N.B.—Very remarkable." "Remarkable State Paper drawn by Pole and addressed to the Pope at the time of the interview at Paris between Francis and the Emperor." "Privy Council to the Duke of Norfolk. Marquis of Exeter to Sir A. Brown. Promise of money. Directions to send relief to the Duke of Suffolk in Lincolnshire, etc." "Henry VIII. to the Duke of Norfolk about November 27th, 1536. Part of it in his own hand. High and chivalrous." "Curious account of the ferocity of the clergy in Lincolnshire." "Curious questions addressed to Fisher Bishop of Rochester on some treasonable foreign correspondence." "Learned men to be sent to preach to the disaffected counties. Henry's version of the causes of the insurrection—-N.B., and the cure." "Instructions to the Earl of Sussex for tranquillising the North after the Insurrection. Long and curious—noticeable list of accusations against the monastic bodies. In Wriothesley's hand." "Sir Francis Bigod to Sir Robert Constable. Very remarkable account of his unpopularity in the first rebellion from suspicion of heresy, January 18th, 1537." "Emperor at Paris, 1539. War between France and England. Secret causes why the Emperor made a secret peace with France." "Lord Lisle to Henry VIII. on his chance of running down the French fleet as they lay at anchor, July 21st, 1545." "Losses of the old families by the suppression—new foundation by Henry VIII. Bishoprics, hospitals, colleges, etc." "The Abbot of Coggeshall hides jewels, makes away goods, maintains Rome and consults the devil." "Henry VIII. to Justices of the Peace, admonition for neglect of duty. Highly in character." "King's Highness having discovered all the enormities of the clergy, pardons all that is past, and exhorts them to a Christian life in all time to come."

During the three months to which alone this list refers Froude must have read and studied more than four hundred pages of important documents. If any one wishes to form a correct judgment of Froude as an historian, he can scarcely begin better than by reversing every statement that Freeman felt it his duty to make. Froude came to write about the sixteenth century after careful study of previous times. He prepared himself for his task by patient research among letters and manuscripts such as Freeman never thought of attempting. He neglected no source of information open to him, and he obtained special privileges for searching Spanish archives which entailed upon him the severest labour. He studied not only at Simancas, where none had been before him, but also in Paris, in Brussels, in Vienna. The documents he read were in half a dozen languages, sometimes in the vilest scrawls. Long afterwards he described his own experience in his own graphic way. "Often at the end of a page," he said, "I have felt as after descending a precipice, and have wondered how I got down. I had to cut my way through a jungle, for no one had opened the road for me. I have been turned into rooms piled to the window-sill with bundles of dust-covered despatches, and told to make the best of it. Often I have found the sand glistening on the ink where it had been sprinkled when a page was turned. There the letter had lain, never looked at again since it was read and put away." Out of such materials Froude wrote a History which any educated person can read with undisturbed enjoyment. He was too good an artist to let his own difficulties be seen, and they were assumed not to exist. Froude did not write, like Stubbs, for professional students alone; he wrote for the general public, for those whom Freeman affected to despise. So did Macaulay, whom Freeman idolised. So did Gibbon, the greatest historian of all time. Froude's History covered the most controversial period in the growth of the English Church. Lynx-eyed critics, with their powers sharpened by partisanship, searched it through and through for errors the most minute. Some of course they found. But they did not find one which interfered with the main argument, and such evidence as has since been discovered confirms Froude's proposition that the cause of Henry was the cause of England. Freeman's Norman Conquest has secured for him an honourable fame; his attacks upon Froude, until they have been forgotten, will always be a reproach to his memory.

It was with just pride, and natural satisfaction, that Froude wrote to Lady Derby in May, 1890: "I am revising my English History for a final edition. Since I wrote it the libraries and archives of all Europe have been searched and sifted. I am fairly astonished to find how little I shall have to alter. The book is of course young, but I do not know that it is the worse on that account. That fault at any rate I shall not try to cure."

The Divorce of Katharine of Aragon, though not published till 1891, is a sequel to the History. The twenty years which had intervened did not lead Froude to modify any of his main conclusions, and he was able to furnish new evidence in support of them. The correspondence of Chapuys, Imperial Ambassador at the court of Henry VIII., puts Fisher's treason beyond doubt, and proves that the bishop was endeavouring to procure an invasion by Spanish troops when the king, in Freeman's language, "slaughtered" him. The next year Froude brought out, in a volume with other essays, his Spanish Story of the Armada, written in his raciest manner, and proving from Spanish sources the grotesque incompetence of Medina Sidonia. There are few better narratives in the language, and the enthusiastic admiration of a great American humourist was as well deserved as it is charmingly expressed.

"The other night," wrote Bret Harte, "I took up Longman's Magazine* and began to lazily read something about the Spanish Armada. My knowledge of that historic event, I ought to say, is rather hazy; I remember a vague something about Drake playing bowls while the Spanish fleet was off the coast, and of Elizabeth going to Tilbury en grande tenue, but there was always a good deal of 'Jingo' shouting and Crystal Palace fireworks about it, and it never seemed real. In the article I was reading the style caught me first; I became tremendously interested; it was a new phase of the old story, and yet there was something pleasantly familiar. I turned to the last page quickly, and saw your blessed name. I had heard nothing about it before. Then I went through it breathlessly to the last word, which came all too soon. And now I am as eager for the next instalment as I was when a boy for the next chapter of my Dickens or Thackeray. Don't laugh, dear old fellow, over my enthusiasm or my illustration, but remember that I represent a considerable amount of average human nature, and that's what we all write for, and ought to write for, and be dashed to the critics who say to the contrary! I thought your parallel of Philip and Don Quixote delightful, but the similitude of Medina Sidonia and Sancho Panza is irresistible. That letter to Philip is Sancho's own hand! Where did you get it? How long have you had it up your sleeve? Have you got any more such cards to play? Can you not give us a picture of those gentlemen adventurers with their exalted beliefs, their actual experiences, their little jealousies, and the love-lorn Lope de Vega in their midst? What mankind you have come upon, dear Froude! How I envy you! Have you nothing to spare for a poor literary man like myself, who has made all he could out of the hulk of a poor old Philippine galleon on Pacific seas? Couldn't you lend me a Don or a galley-slave out of that delightful crew of solemn lunatics? And yet how splendid are those last orders of the Duke! With what a swan-like song they sailed away!"

— * The successor to Fraser. —

The letter from Medina Sidonia to Philip, which reminded both Froude and Bret Harte of Sancho Panza, is too delicious not to be given in full.

"My health is bad, and from my small experience of the water I know that I am always sea-sick. I have no money which I can spare, I owe a million ducats, and I have not a real to spend on my outfit. The expedition is on such a scale, and the object is of such high importance, that the person at the head of it ought to understand navigation and sea-fighting, and I know nothing of either. I have not one of those essential qualifications. I have no acquaintance among the officers who are to serve under me. Santa Cruz had information about the state of things in England; I have none. Were I competent otherwise, I should have to act in the dark by the opinion of others, and I cannot tell to whom I may trust. The Adelantado of Castile would do better than I. Our Lord would help him, for he is a good Christian, and has fought in several battles. If you send me, depend upon it, I shall have a bad account to render of my trust."*

— * Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 19, 20. —

"Those last orders of the Duke"—the same Duke, by the way—are "splendid" enough of their kind. "From highest to lowest you are to understand the object of our expedition, which is to recover countries to the Church now oppressed by the enemies of the true faith. I therefore beseech you to remember your calling, so that God may be with us in what we do. I charge you, one and all, to abstain from profane oaths, dishonouring to the names of our Lord, our Lady, and the Saints. All personal quarrels are to be suspended while the expedition lasts, and for a month after it is completed. Neglect of this will be held as treason. Each morning at sunrise the ship-boys, according to custom, will sing 'Good Morrow' at the foot of the mainmast, and at sunset the 'Ave Maria.' Since bad weather may interrupt the communications the watchword is laid down for each day in the week: Sunday, Jesus; the days succeeding, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Trinity, Santiago, the Angels, All Saints, and Our Lady."*

— * Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 27, 28. —

"God and one," it has been said, "make a majority." But in this case
God was not on the side of the pious and incompetent Medina Sidonia.

It was not till this same year 1892, after Freeman's death, that the "Calendar of Letters and State Papers relative to English affairs preserved principally in the Archives of Simancas" began to be published in England by the Master of the Rolls. Translated by an eminent scholar, Mr. Martin Hume, and printed in a book, they could have been read by Freeman himself, and can be read by any one who cares to undertake the task. They will at least give some idea of the enormous labour undergone by Froude in his several sojourns at Simancas. I cannot profess to have instituted a systematic comparison, but a few specimens selected at random show that Froude summarised fairly the documents with which he dealt. That there should be some discrepancies was inevitable.

Philip II. wrote a remarkably bad hand, and his Ambassadors were not chosen for their penmanship. The most striking fact in the case is that Mr. Hume has derived assistance from Froude in the performance of his own duties. "I have," he writes in his Introduction, "very carefully compared the Spanish text when doubtful with Mr. Froude's extracts and copies and with transcripts of many of the letters in the British Museum." Nothing could give a better idea than this sentence of the difficulties which Froude had to surmount, or of the fidelity with which he surmounted them. He had not only achieved his own object: he also smoothed the path of future labourers in the same field. It was the inaccessibility of the records at Simancas that enabled Freeman to accuse Froude of not correctly transcribing or abstracting manuscripts. Like other people, he made mistakes; but mistakes have to be weighed as well as counted, and even in enumerating Froude's we must always remember that he used more original matter than any other modern historian.

CHAPTER VI

IRELAND AND AMERICA

Froude had made history the business of his life, and he had no sooner completed his History of England than he turned his attention to the sister people. The Irish chapters in his great book had been picked out by hostile critics as especially good, and in them he had strongly condemned the cruel misgovernment of an Englishman otherwise so humane as Essex. While he was in Ireland he had examined large stores of material in Dublin, which he compared with documents at the Record Office in London, and he contemplated early in 1871, if not before, a book on Irish history. For this task he was not altogether well qualified. The religion of Celtic Ireland was repugnant to him, and he never thoroughly understood it. In religious matters Froude could not be neutral. Where Catholic and Protestant came into conflict, he took instinctively, almost involuntarily, the Protestant side. In the England of the sixteenth century the Protestant side was the side of England. In Ireland the case was reversed, and the spirit of Catholicism was identical with the spirit of nationality. Irish Catholics to this day associate Protestantism with the sack of Drogheda and Wexford, with the detested memory of Oliver Cromwell. To Froude, as to Carlyle, Cromwell was the minister of divine vengeance upon murderous and idolatrous Papists. His liking for the Irish, though perfectly genuine, was accompanied with an underlying contempt which is more offensive to the objects of it than the hatred of an open foe. He regarded them as a race unfit for self-government, who had proved their unworthiness of freedom by not winning it with the sword. If they had not quarrelled among themselves, and betrayed one another, they would have established their right to independence; or, if there had been still an Act of Union, they could have come in, as the Scots came, on their own terms. For an Englishman to write the history of Ireland without prejudice he must be either a cosmopolitan philosopher, or a passionless recluse. Froude was an ardent patriot, and his early studies in hagiology had led him to the conclusion, not now accepted, that St. Patrick never existed at all. His scepticism about St. Patrick might have been forgiven to a man who had probably not much belief in St. George. But Froude could not help running amok at all the popular heroes of Ireland. In the first of his two papers describing a fortnight in Kerry he went out of his way to depreciate the fame of Daniel O'Connell. "Ireland," he wrote, "has ceased to care for him. His fame blazed like a straw bonfire, and has left behind it scarce a shovelful of ashes. Never any public man had it in his power to do so much good for his country, nor was there ever one who accomplished so little."*

— * Short Studies, vol. ii. p. 241. —

That O'Connell wasted much time in clamouring for Repeal is perfectly true. But he was as much the author of Catholic Emancipation as Cobden was the author of Free Trade, and that fact alone should have debarred Froude from the use of this extravagant language. For though an article in Fraser's Magazine is a very different thing from a serious history, print imposes some obligations, and even two or three casual sentences may show the bent of a man's mind. Whatever Froude wrote on Ireland, or on anything else, was sure to be widely read, and to affect, for good or for evil, the opinion of the British public. It was therefore peculiarly incumbent on him not to flatter English pride by wounding Irish self-respect.

While Froude was writing his English in Ireland he received an invitation to give a series of lectures in the United States. "The Yankees," he says to Skelton,+ "have written to me about going over to lecture to them. I am strongly tempted; but I could not tell the truth about Ireland without reflecting in a good many ways on my own country. I don't fancy doing that, however justly, to amuse Jonathan." These words certainly do not show implacable bitterness against Ireland. Brought face to face with responsibility, Froude always felt the weight of it, and he was never consciously unfair. He was under a strong sense of obligation, which he felt bound to fulfil. It is impossible not to admire the chivalrous and intrepid spirit with which he undertook singlehanded to justify the conduct of his countrymen before the American people, and to persuade them that England had provocation for her treatment of Ireland. Once convinced that his cause was righteous, he never flinched. He believed that false views of the Irish question prevailed in America, and that he could set them right. He did not altogether underrate the magnitude of the enterprise. "I go like an Arab of the desert," he wrote to Skelton a little later: "my hand will be against every man, and therefore every man's hand will be against me."* A belief in Ireland's wrongs was part of the American creed, like the faithlessness of Charles II. and the tyranny of George III. Irish Americans had enormous influence at elections, in Congress, and in the newspapers. Released Fenians, O'Donovan Rossa among them, had been spreading what they called the light, and their own countrymen at all events believed what they said. The American people as a whole were not unfriendly to England. The Alabama Arbitration and the Geneva Award had destroyed the ill feeling that remained after the fall of Richmond. But it was not worth the while of any American politician to alienate the Irish vote, and most Americans honestly thought, not without reason, that the policy of England in Ireland had been abominable. To let sleeping dogs lie might be wise. Once they were unchained, no American hand would help to chain them up again. Froude, however, conceived that circumstances were unusually favourable. The Irish Church had been disestablished, and the Fenian prisoners had been set free. The Irish Land Act of 1870 had recognised the Irish tenant's right to a partnership in the soil. Although Froude had no sympathy, ecclesiastical or political, with Gladstone, he did think that the Land Act was a just and beneficent measure from which good would come. In the firm belief that he could vindicate the statesmanship of his own country before American audiences without sacrificing the paramount claims of truth and justice, he accepted the invitation.

—
+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 149.
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 151.
—

After a summer cruise in a big schooner with his friend Lord Ducie, whose hospitality at sea he often in coming years enjoyed, Froude sailed from Liverpool in the Russia at the end of September, 1872, with the distinguished physicist John Tyndall. He was a good sailor, and loved a voyage. In his first letter to his wife from American soil he describes a storm with the delight of a schoolboy. "On Saturday morning it blew so hard that it was scarcely possible to stand on deck. The wind and waves dead ahead, and the whole power of the engines only just able to move the ship against it. It was the grandest sight I ever witnessed—the splendid Russia, steady as if she were on a railway, holding her straight course without yielding one point to the sea—up the long hill-sides of the waves and down into the troughs—the crests of the sea all round as far as the eye could reach in one wild whirl of foam and spray. It was worth coming into the Atlantic to see—with the sense all the time of perfect security."

Froude's visit was in one respect well timed. President Grant had just been assured of his second term, and even politicians had leisure to think of their famous guest. He was at once invited to a great banquet in New York, and found himself lodged with sumptuous hospitality in a luxurious hotel at the expense of the Bureau which had organised the lectures. One newspaper quaintly described him as "looking like a Scotch farmer, with an open frank face and calm mild eyes." His History was well known, for the Scribners had sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. His opinions were of course freely invited, and he did not hesitate to give them. "I talk much Toryism to them all, and ridicule the idea of England's decay, or of our being in any danger of revolution; and with Colonies and India and Commerce, etc., I insist that we are just as big as they are, and have just as large a future before us." Both Froude and his hosts might have remembered with advantage Disraeli's fine saying that great nations are those which produce great men. But the sensual idolatry of mere size is almost equally common on both sides of the Atlantic.

The banquet was given by Froude's American publishers, the Scribners, and his old acquaintance Emerson was one of the company. Another was a popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, and a third was the present Ambassador of the United States in London, Mr. Whitelaw Reid. In his speech Froude referred to the object of his visit. He had heard at home that "one of the most prominent Fenian leaders," O'Donovan Rossa, "was making a tour in the United States, dilating upon English tyranny and the wrongs of Ireland." That Froude should cross the seas to confute O'Donovan Rossa must have struck the audience as scarcely credible, until he explained his mission, for as such he regarded it, by asserting that "the judgment of America has more weight in Ireland than twenty batteries of English cannon." When the Irish had the management of their own affairs, he continued, the result was universal misery. They could not govern themselves in the sixteenth century; therefore they could not govern themselves in the nineteenth. If American opinion would only tell the Irish that they had no longer any grievances which legislation could redress, the Irish would believe it, and all would be well.

Though courteously treated as a representative Englishman, Froude had of course no official position, and he hoped that as a private individual his voice might be heard. But, while there were thousands of native Americans who had no love for their Irish fellow-citizens, there were very few indeed who cared to take up England's case against Ireland. The Democratic party were inclined to sympathise with Home Rule as being a mild form of Secession, and the Republican party did not see why Ireland should be refused the qualified independence enjoyed by every State of the Union. In these unfavourable circumstances Froude delivered his first lecture. He made a good point when he described the Irish peasant in Munster or Connaught looking to America as his natural protector. "There is not a lad," he exclaimed, "in an Irish national school who does not pore over the maps of the States which hang on the walls, gaze on them with admiration and hope, and count the years till he too shall set his foot in those famous cities which float before his imagination like the gardens of Aladdin." Nevertheless he asked his hearers and readers to take it from him that Ireland had no longer any good ground of complaint against the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Independence she could not have, and that not because the interests of Great Britain forbade it, which would have been an intelligible argument, but because she was unfit for it herself.

"If I were to sum up in one sentence the secret of Ireland's misfortunes, I should say it lay in this: that while from the first she has resisted England, complained of England, appealed to heaven and earth against the wrongs which England has inflicted on her, she has ever invited others to help her, and has never herself made an effective fight for her own rights …. A majority of hustings votes might be found for a separation. The majority would be less considerable if instead of a voting-paper they were called to handle a rifle."

To tell Irishmen that they could obtain liberty by fighting for it, and would never get it in any other way, was not likely to conciliate them, or to promote the cause of peace. Froude's appeal to American opinion, however, was more practical.

"The Irishman requires to be ruled, but ruled as all men ought to be, by the laws of right and wrong, laws which shall defend the weak from the strong and the poor from the rich. When the poor peasant is secured the reward of his own labour, and is no longer driven to the blunderbuss to save himself and his family from legalised robbery, if he prove incorrigible then, I will give him up. But the experiment remains to be made."

An example had been set by Gladstone in the Land Act, and that was the path which further legislation ought to follow. So far there would not be much disagreement between Froude and most Irish Americans. Rack-renting upon the tenants' improvements was the bane of Irish agriculture, and the Act of 1870 was precisely what Froude described it, a partial antidote. Then the lecturer reverted to ancient history, to the Annals of the Four Masters, and the Danish invasion. The audience found it rather long, and rather dull, even though Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick were all built by the Danes. But a foundation had to be laid, and Froude felt bound also to make it clear that he did not take the old Whig view of Government as a necessary evil, or swear by the "dismal science" of Adam Smith.

He concluded his first lecture in words which at once defined his position and challenged the whole Irish race. "It was not tyranny," he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving Ireland to herself which she demands so passionately that was the cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for instruction, but to look out for mistakes. An article in The New York Tribune, which spoke of Froude with admiration and esteem, told him plainly enough how it would be. "We have had historical lecturers before, but never any who essayed with such industry, learning, and eloquence to convince a nation that its sympathies for half a century at least have have been misplaced …. The thesis which he only partly set out for the night—that the misfortunes of Ireland are rather due to the congenital qualities of the race than to wrongs inflicted by their conquerors—will excite earnest and perhaps bitter controversy." This prediction was abundantly fulfilled, and the controversy spoiled the tour. A friendly and sympathetic journalist questioned Froude's "wisdom in coming before our people with this course of lectures on Irish history … We do not care for the domestic troubles of other nations, and it is a piece of impertinence to thrust them upon our attention. Mr. Froude knows perfectly well that England would resent, and rightfully, the least interference on our part with her Irish policy or her Irish subjects."

In this criticism there is a large amount of common sense, and Froude would have done well to think of it before. He was not, however, a man to be put down by clamour; he was sustained by the fervour of his convictions, and it was too late for remonstrance. His lectures had all been carefully prepared, and he went steadily on with them. The unusual charge of dullness, which had been made against some passages in his opening discourse, was never made again. The lectures became a leading topic of conversation, and a subject of fierce attack. Without fear, and in defiance of his critics, he dashed into the reign of Henry VIII., "the English Blue Beard, whom I have been accused of attempting to whitewash." "I have no particular veneration for kings," he said. "The English Liturgy speaks of them officially as most religious and gracious. They have been, I suppose, as religious and gracious as other men, neither more nor less. The chief difference is that we know more of kings than we know of other men." Henry had a short way with absentees. He took away their Irish estates, "and gave them to others who would reside and attend to their work. It would have been confiscation doubtless," beyond the power of American Congress, though not of a British Parliament. "If in later times there had been more such confiscations, Ireland would not have been the worse for it." Here, then, Froude was on the side of the Irish. Here, as always, he was under the influence of Carlyle. His ideal form of government was an enlightened despotism, with a ruler drawn after the pattern of children's story-books, who would punish the wicked and reward the good. Froude never consciously defended injustice, or tampered with the truth. His faults were of the opposite kind. He could not help speaking out the whole truth as it appeared to him, without regard for time, place, or expediency. If he could have defended England without attacking Ireland, all would have been well, but he could not do it. For his defence of England, stated simply, was that Ireland had always been, and still remained, incapable of managing her own affairs. "Free nations, gentlemen, are not made by playing at insurrection. If Ireland desires to be a nation, she must learn not merely to shout for liberty, but to fight for it" against a bigger nation with a standing army in which many Irishmen were enlisted. The Irish are a sensitive as well as a generous race; and they feel taunts as much as more substantial wrongs. When the first British statesman of his time, not a Roman Catholic, nor, as the Irish would have said, a Catholic at all, had denounced the upas, or poison, tree of Protestant ascendency, and had cut off its two principal branches, Froude wasted his breath in telling the American Irish, or the American people, that Gladstone did not know what he was talking about. The Irish Church Act, the Irish Land Act, the release of the Fenians, appealed to them as honest measures of justice and conciliation. There was nothing conciliatory in Froude's language, and they did not think it just. From the purely historical point of view he had much to say for himself, as, for instance:

"The Papal cause in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons, and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in Ireland it assumed the accidental form of the defence of the freedom of opinion."

Perhaps not. Ireland, for good or for evil, was connected with England, and when England was at war with the Pope she was at war with him in Ireland as elsewhere. The argument, however, is double- edged. The Papal cause being no longer, for various reasons, the cause of stake and gibbet, how could there be the same ground for restricting freedom of opinion in Ireland, for passing Coercion Acts, for refusing Home Rule? As Froude himself said, "Popery now has its teeth drawn. It can bark, but it can no longer bite." "The Irish generally," he went on, "were rather superstitious than religious." These. are delicate distinctions. "The Bishop of Peterborough must understand," said John Bright on a famous occasion, "that I believe in holy earth as little as he believes in holy water." Elizabeth's Irish policy was to take advantage of local factions, and to maintain English supremacy by setting them against each other. "The result was hideous. The forty-five glorious years of Elizabeth were to Ireland years of unremitting wretchedness." Nobody could complain that Froude spared the English Government. If he had been writing history, or rather when he was writing it, the mutual treachery of the Irish could not be passed over. "Alas and shame for Ireland," said Froude in New York. "Not then only, but many times before and after, the same plan [offer of pardon to murderous traitors] was tried, and was never known to fail. Brother brought in the dripping head of brother, son of father, comrade of comrade. I pardon none, said an English commander, until they have imbued their hands in blood." The revival of such horrors on a public platform could serve no useful purpose. They could not be pleaded as an apology for England, and they inflamed, instead of soothing, the animosities which Froude professed himself anxious to allay. Yet he never lost sight of justice. On Elizabeth he had no mercy. He made her responsible for the slaughter of men, women, and children by her officers, for first neglecting her duties as ruler, and then putting down rebellion by assassination. The plantation of Ulster by 'James I., and the accompanying forfeiture of Catholic estates, he defended on the ground that only the idle rich were dispossessed. This is of course socialism pure and simple. James I.'s own excuse was that Tyrone and Tyrconnell, who owned the greater part of Ulster between them, had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. If they were, the loss of their lands was a very mild penalty indeed.

On the rebellion of 1641, which led to Cromwell's terrible retribution, Froude touched lightly. Although the number of Protestants who perished in the massacre has been exaggerated, the attempts of Catholic historians to deny it, or explain it away, are futile. Sir William Petty's figure of 38,000 is as well authenticated as any. Froude of course justifies Cromwell for putting, eight years afterwards, the garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford to the sword. His characteristic intrepidity was never more fully shown than in these appeals to American opinion against the Irish race and creed. Unfortunately the practical result of them was the reverse of what he intended. He preached the gospel of force. Thus he expressed it in reply to Cromwell's critics: "I say frankly, that I believe the control of human things in this world is given to the strong, and those who cannot hold their own ground with all advantage on their side must bear the Consequences of their weakness." The Holy Inquisition, might have used this language in Italy or in Spain. Any tyrant might use it at any time. It was denied in anticipation by an older and higher authority than Carlyle in the words "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." There is a better morality, if indeed there be a worse, than reverence for big battalions.

Sceptre and crown
Must topple down,
And in the earth be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade;

Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

Froude seldom did things by halves, and his apology for Cromwell is not half-hearted. He applauds the celebrated pronouncement, "I meddle with no man's conscience; but if you mean by liberty of conscience, liberty to have the mass, that will not be suffered where the Parliament of England has power." A great deal has happened since Cromwell's time, and the mass is no longer the symbol of intolerance, if only because the Church of Rome has no power to persecute. Cromwell would have had a short shrift if he had fallen into the hands of mass-goers. To tolerate intolerance is a Christian duty, and therefore possible for an individual. Whether it was possible for the Lord General in 1650 is a question hardly suited for popular treatment on a public platform. All that he did was right in Froude's eyes, including the prescription of "Hell or Connaught" for "the men whose trade was fighting, who had called themselves lords of the soil," and the abolition of the Irish Parliament. "I as an Englishman," said Froude, "honour Cromwell and glory in him as the greatest statesman and soldier our race has produced. In the matter we have now in hand I consider him to have been the best friend, in the best sense, to all that was good in Ireland." This is of course an opinion which can honestly be held. But to the Irish race all over the world such language is an irritating defiance, and they simply would not listen to any man who used it.

The expulsion of Presbyterians under Charles II. was foolish as well as cruel, for it deprived the English Government in Ireland of their best friends, and supplied the American colonies with some of their staunchest soldiers in the War of Independence. Enough were left, however, to immortalise the siege of Derry, while the native Irish failed to distinguish themselves, or, in plain English, ran away, at the Battle of the Boyne, and the defeat of James II. was recognised by the Treaty of Limerick. An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under Charles II. The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and forcible terms by Froude. Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his vigilant eye. "I believe," he said, "Bishops have produced more mischief in this world than any class of officials that have ever been invented." The petition of the Irish Parliament for union with England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought; Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that smuggling thrived better than any other trade. The country was pillaged by absent landlords, and "the mere hint of an absentee tax was sufficient to throw the younger Pitt into convulsions." The Irish Protestant Bishops provoked the savage satire of Swift, who doubted not that excellent men had been appointed, and only deplored that they should be personated by scoundrels who had murdered them on Hounslow Heath.

These lectures stung the Irish to the quick, and gave much embarrassment to Froude's American friends. The Irish found a powerful champion in Father Burke, the Dominican friar, who had been a popular preacher at Rome, and with an audience of his own Catholic countrymen was irresistible. Burke was not a well informed man, and his knowledge of history was derived from Catholic handbooks. But the occasion did not call for dry facts. Froude had not been passionless, and what the Irish wanted in reply was the rhetorical eloquence which to the Father was second nature. Burke, however, had the good taste and good sense to acknowledge that Froude suffered from nothing worse than the invincible prejudice which all Catholics attribute to all Protestants. As a Protestant and an Englishman, Froude could not be expected to give such a history of Ireland as would be agreeable to Irishmen. "Yet to the honour of this learned gentleman be it said that he frankly avows the injuries which have been done, and that he comes nearer than any man whom I have ever heard to the real root of the remedy to be applied to these evils." When his handling of documentary evidence was criticised, Froude repeated his challenge to the editor of The Saturday Review, which had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of fair play gave judgment in his favour. But how was public opinion to pronounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian II., granting Ireland to Henry II of England? The Bull was not in existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all. Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by later Bulls of succeeding Popes. The matter had no interest for Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore. Burke had more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian massacres of Such 1649. Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked upon heretics. The combat was not so much unequal as impossible. There was no common groud. Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if he were a Protestant. His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted alike for its eloquence and its justice. "In those singular labyrinths of intrigue and treachery," meaning the secret correspondence at the Castle, "I have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the reputation of Henry Grattan. I say nothing of the temptations to which he was exposed. There were no honours with which England would not have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not have paid to have silenced or subsidised him. He was one of those perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind. They passed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to turn his back on them. In every step of his life he was governed simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his country." Grattan's Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion of 1798. It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever sat within its walls. Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by the "delirium of nationality," and the true Irish statesman of his time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, whose name is only less abhorred by Irish Nationalists than Cromwell's own. Americans did not think nationality a delirium, and their ideal of statesmanship was not represented by Lord Clare.

The fifth and last of Froude's American lectures was reprinted in Short Studies with the title of "Ireland since the Union."* It has a closer bearing upon current politics than the others, and it runs counter to American as well as to Irish sentiment. "Suppose in any community two-thirds who are cowards vote one way, and the remaining third will not only vote, but fight the other way." The argument has often been used against woman's suffrage. One obvious answer is that women, like men, would vote on different sides. In a community where two-thirds of the adult male population were cowards problems of government would doubtless assume a secondary importance, and that there are limits to the power of majorities no sane Constitutionalist denies.

— * Vol. ii. pp, 515-598. —

Short of making Carlyle Dictator of the Universe, Froude suggested no alternative to the ballot-box of civilised life. This last lecture, however, is chiefly remarkable for the rare tribute which it pays to the services of the Catholic priesthood. Father Burke himself must have been melted when he read, "Ireland is one of the poorest countries in Europe. There is less theft, less cheating, less house-breaking, less robbery of all sorts, than in any country of the same size in the world. In the wild district where I lived we slept with unlocked door and open windows, with as much security as if we had been—I will not say in London or New York, I should be sorry to try the experiment in either place: I will say as if we had been among the saints in Paradise. In the sixteenth century the Irish were notoriously regardless of what is technically morality. For the last hundred years at least impurity has been almost unknown in Ireland. And this absence of vulgar crime, and this exceptional delicacy and modesty of character, are due alike, to their ever- lasting honour, to the influence of the Catholic clergy." That is the testimony of an opponent, and it is emphatic testimony indeed. To O'Connell Froude is again conspicuously unjust, and his remark that "a few attacks on handfuls of the police, or the blowing in of the walls of an English prison . . . will not overturn an Empire" is open to the observation that they disestablished a Church. When Froude came to practical politics, he always seemed to be "moving about in worlds not realised." His statement that national education in Ireland was the best that existed in any part of the Empire almost takes one's breath away, and the idea that no Irish legislature would have passed the Land Act is a strange fantasy indeed. Whether an Irish Parliament could be trusted to deal fairly by the landlords is an open question. That it would fail to consider the interests of the tenants is unthinkable. Froude was on much firmer ground when he employed the case of Protestant Ulster, the Ulster of the Plantation, as an argument against Home Rule. Those Protestants would, he said, fight rather than submit to a Catholic majority, and England could not assent to shooting them down. There is only one real answer to this objection, and that is that Protestant Ulster would do nothing of the kind. A logical method of reconciling contradictory prophecies has never been found. In 1872 Home Rule had no support in England, and even in Ireland the electors were pretty equally divided. Froude did not lay hold of the American mind, as he might have done, by showing the inapplicability of the Federal System which suits the United States to the circumstances of the United Kingdom.

The impression made by Froude upon his audiences in New York is graphically described by an American reporter.

"Mr. Froude improved very much in delivery and manner during this course of lectures …. In his earlier lectures his ways were awkward, his speech was too rapid, and he did not know what in world to do with his hands. It was quite to see him run them under his coat tails, spread them across his shirt front, stick them in his breeches pockets, twirl them in the arm-holes his vest, or hold them behind his back. He has now found out how to dispose of them in a more or less natural way. His delivery is less rapid, his voice better modulated, and his enunciation more distinct …. One of his most effective peculiarities, in inviting the attention of his hearers, is the exceeding earnestness of the manner of his address. This earnestness is not like that of rant. It is the result of his own strong conviction and his desire to impress others." That is a fair and unprejudiced estimate of Froude as he appeared to a trained observer who took neither side in the dispute. Many Irishmen shook hands with him, and thanked him for his plain speaking. Bret Harte told him that even those who dissented most widely from his opinions admired his "grit." But politicians had to think of the Irish vote, and the proprietors of newspapers could not ignore their Catholic subscribers. The priests worked against him with such effect that Mr. Peabody's servants in Boston, who were Irish Catholics, threatened to leave their places if Froude remained as a guest in their master's house. Father Burke, who had begun politely enough, became obstreperous and abusive. Froude's life was in danger, and he was put under the special protection of the police. The English newspapers, except The Pall Mall Gazette, gave him no support, and The Times treated his enterprise as Quixotic. A preposterous rumour that he received payment from the British Ministry obtained circulation among respectable persons in New York. He had intended to visit the Western States, but the project was abandoned in consequence of growing Irish hostility which made him feel that further effort would be useless. It was not that he thought his arguments refuted, or capable of refutation. He had considered them too long, and too carefully, for that. But the well had been poisoned. The malicious imputation of bribery was caught up by the more credulous Irish, and their priests warned them that they would do wrong in listening to a heretic. As for the American people, they had no mind to take up the quarrel. It was no business of theirs.

Some extracts from Froude's letters to his wife will show how much he enjoyed American hospitality, and how far he appreciated American character. "I was received on Saturday," he wrote from New York on the 4th of October, 1872, "as a member of the Lotus Club—the wits and journalists of New York. It was the strangest scene I ever was present at. They were very clever—very witty at each other's expense, very complimentary to me; and, believe me, they worked the publishers who were present for the profit they were making out of me." He was agreeably surprised by the merchant princes of New York. "There is absolutely no vulgarity about them. They are immensely rich, but simple, and rather elaborately 'religious' in the forms of their lives. A very long grace is always said before dinner. In this and many ways they are totally unlike what I expected." Again, after a description of Cornell's University, he says, "There is Mr. Cornell, who has made all this, living in a little poky house in a street with a couple of maids, his wife and daughters dressed in the homeliest manner. His name will be remembered for centuries as having spent his wealth in the very best institutions on which a country's prosperity depends. Our people spend their fortunes in buying great landed estates to found and perpetuate their own family. I wonder which name will last the longest, Mr. Cornell's or Lord Overstone's." "There is no such thing," he says elsewhere, "as founding a family, and those who save good fortunes have to give them to the public when they die for want of a better use to put them to."

With sincerely religious people, especially if they were Evangelicals, Froude felt deep sympathy. Patronage of religion he detested, most of all the form of it which prescribes religion for other people. An American philosopher called, and told him that, having failed to find a new creed, he thought the old superstitions had better be kept up, Popery for choice. "This," remarks Froude, "is what I call want of faith. If you can believe that what you are convinced is a lie may nevertheless exert a wholesome moral influence on people, and that, whether true or not, or rather though certainly not true, it is good to be preserved and taken up with, you are to all practical purposes an atheist."