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