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.