FROUDE AND FREEMAN
Froude's reputation as an historian was seriously damaged for a time
by the persistent attacks of The Saturday Review. It is difficult for
the present generation to understand the influence which that
celebrated periodical exercised, or the terror which it inspired,
forty years ago. The first editor, Douglas Cook, was a master of his
craft, and his colleagues included the most brilliant writers of the
day. Matthew Arnold, who was not one of them, paid them the
compliment of treating them as the special champions of Philistia,
the chosen garrison of Gath. On most subjects they were fairly
impartial, holding that there was nothing new and nothing true, and
that if there were it wouldn't matter. But the proprietor* of the
paper at that time was a High Churchman, and on ecclesiastical
questions he put forward his authority. Within that sphere he would
not tolerate either neutrality or difference of opinion. To him, and
to those who thought like him, Froude's History was anathema. Their
detested Reformation was set upon its legs again; Bishop Fisher was
removed from his pedestal; the Church of England, which since Keble's
assize sermon had been the Church of the Fathers, was shown to be
Protestant in its character and Parliamentary in its constitution.
The Oxford Movement seemed to be discredited, and that by a man who
had once been enlisted in its service. It was necessary that the
presumptuous iconoclast should be put down, and taught not to meddle
with things which were sacred.
--
* Alexander James Beresford Hope, some time member for the University
of Cambridge.
--
From the first The Saturday Review was hostile, but it was not till
1864 that the campaign became systematic. At that time the editor
secured the services of Edward Augustus Freeman, who had been for
several years a contributor on miscellaneous topics. Freeman is well
known as the historian of the Norman Conquest, as an active
politician, controversialist, and pamphleteer. Froude toiled for
months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost
illegible, carefully noting the caligraphy, and among the authors of
a joint composition assigning his proper share to each. Freeman wrote
his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time
engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or an
original document of any kind. Every historian must take his own
line, and the public are concerned not with processes, but with results.
I wish merely to point out the fact that, as between Froude
and Freeman, the assailed and the assailant, Froude was incomparably
the more laborious student of the two. It would be hard to say that
one historian should not review the work of another; but we may at
least expect that he should do so with sympathetic consideration for
the difficulties which all historians encounter, and should not pass
sentence until he has all the evidence before him. What were
Freeman's qualifications for delivering an authoritative judgment on
the work of Froude? Though not by any means so learned a man as his
tone of conscious superiority induced people to suppose, he knew his
own period very well indeed, and his acquaintance with that period,
perhaps also his veneration for Stubbs, had given him a natural
prejudice in favour of the Church. For the Church of the middle ages,
the undivided Church of Christ, was even in its purely mundane aspect
the salvation of society, the safeguard of law and order, the last
restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched.
Historically, if not doctrinally, Freeman was a High Churchman, and
his ecclesiastical leanings were a great advantage to him in dealing
with the eleventh century. It was far otherwise when he came to write
of the sixteenth. If the Church of the sixteenth century had been
like the Church of the eleventh century, or the twelfth, or the
thirteenth, there would have been no Reformation, and no Froude.
Freeman lived, and loved, the controversial life. Sharing Gladstone's
politics both in Church and State, he was in all secular matters a
strong Liberal, and his hatred of Disraeli struck even Liberals as
bordering on fanaticism. Yet his hatred of Disraeli was as nothing to
his hatred of Froude. By nature "so over-violent or over-civil that
every man with him was God or devil," he had erected Froude into his
demon incarnate. Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong. He
detested Froude's opinions. He could not away with his style.
Freeman's own style was forcible, vigorous, rhetorical, hard; the
sort of style which Macaulay might have written if he had been a
pedant and a professor instead of a politician and a man of the
world. It was not ill suited for the blood-and-thunder sort of
reviewing to which his nature disposed him, and for the vengeance of
the High Churchmen he seemed an excellent tool.
Freeman's biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken
silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I think the Dean's
conduct was judicious. But there is no reason why a biographer of
Froude should follow his example. On the contrary, it is absolutely
essential that he should not; for Freeman's assiduous efforts, first
in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary, Review, did
ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that
Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless
of the truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more
about Freeman's qualifications for the task which he so lightly and
eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not
incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly
to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for
his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of
April, 1857 [1867?], "You have found me out about the sixteenth
century. I fancy that, from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get
credit for knowing more of those times than I do. But one can
belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are
quite right when you say that I have 'never thrown the whole force of
my mind on that portion of history.'"* These words pour a flood of
light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have
entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade. His object
was to belabour Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as
he says, "very small," but sufficient for enabling him to dispose
satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in
thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion, also writing
to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, "I find I have a
reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of
which I am profoundly ignorant."+
--
* Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman, vol. i. p. 381.
+ ibid. p. 382.
--
It does not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in
The Saturday Review to make people think that, as Froude's critic, he
deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private
disclaims.
Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After Freeman's
death his library was transferred to Owens College, Manchester, and
there, among his other books, is his copy of Froude's History. He
once said himself, in reference to his criticism of Froude, "In truth
there is no kind of temper in the case, but a strong sense of
amusement in bowling down one thing after another." Let us see. Here
are some extracts from his marginal notes. "A lie, teste Stubbs," as
if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any
more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original
documents. Another entry is "Beast," and yet another is "Bah!" "May I
live to embowel James Anthony Froude" is the pious aspiration with
which he has adorned another page. "Can Froude understand honesty?"
asks this anxious inquirer; and again, "Supposing Master Froude were
set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write
paradoxes, would he not curse his day?" Along with such graceful
compliments as "You've found that out since you wrote a book against
your own father," "Give him as slave to Thirlwall," there may be seen
the culminating assertion, "Froude is certainly the vilest brute that
ever wrote a book." Yet there was "no kind of temper in the case,"
and "only a strong sense of amusement." I suppose it must have amused
Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate
that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have
been a very bad temper indeed.
In this judicial frame of mind did Freeman set himself to review
successive volumes of Froude's Elizabeth. Froude did not always
correct his proofs with mechanical accuracy, and this gave Freeman an
advantage of which he was not slow to avail himself. "Mr. Froude," he
says in The Saturday Review for the 30th of January, 1864, "talks of
a French attack on Guienne, evidently meaning Guisnes. It is hardly
possible that this can be a misprint." It was of course a misprint,
and could hardly have been anything else. Guisnes was a town, and
could be attacked. Guienne was a province, and would have been
invaded. Guienne had been a French province since the Hundred Years'
War, and therefore the French would neither have attacked nor invaded
it. As if all this were not enough to show the nature and source of
the error, the word was correctly printed in the marginal heading. In
the same article, after quoting Froude's denial that a sentence
described by the Spanish Ambassador de Silva as having been passed
upon a pirate could have been pronounced in an English court of
justice, Freeman asked, "Is it possible that Mr. Froude has never
heard of the peine forte et dure?" Freeman of course knew it to be
impossible. He knew also that the peine forte et dure was inflicted
for refusing to plead, and that this pirate, by de Silva's own
account, had been found guilty. But he wanted to suggest that Froude
was an ignoramus, and for the purpose of beating a dog one stick is
as good as another.
Freeman's trump card, however, was the Bishop of Lexovia, and that
brilliant victory he never forgot. Froude examined the strange and
startling allegation, cited by Macaulay in his introductory chapter,
that during the reign of Henry VIII. seventy-two thousand persons
perished by the hand of the public executioner. He traced it to the
Commentaries of Cardan, an astrologer, not a very trustworthy
authority, who had himself heard it, he said, from "an unknown Bishop
of Lexovia." "Unknown," observed Freeman, with biting sarcasm, "to no
one who has studied the history of Julius Caesar or of Henry II."
Froude had not been aware that Lexovia was the ancient name for the
modern Lisieux, and for twenty years he was periodically reminded of
the fact. Had he followed Freeman's methods, he might have asked
whether his critic really supposed that there were bishops in the
time of Julius Caesar. Freeman failed to see that the point was not
the modern name of Lexovia, but the number of persons put to death by
Henry, on which Froude had shown the worthlessness of popular
tradition.
Bishop Hooper was burnt at Gloucester in the Cathedral Close. Froude
describes the scene of the execution as "an open space opposite the
College." That shows, says Freeman, that Froude did not, like
Macaulay, visit the scenes of the events he described. Perhaps he did
not visit Gloucester, or even Guisnes. That Freeman's general
conclusion was entirely wide of the mark a single letter from Froude
to Skelton is enough to show. "I want you some day," he wrote on the
12th of December, 1863, "to go with me to Loch Leven, and then to
Stirling, Perth, and Glasgow. Before I go farther I must have a
personal knowledge of Loch Leven Castle and the grounds at Langside.
Also I must look at the street at Linlithgow where Murray was shot."*
Thus Freeman's amiable inference was the exact reverse of the truth.
--
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 131.
--
Some of Freeman's methods, however, were a good deal less scrupulous
than this. By way of bringing home to Froude "ecclesiastical
malignity of the most frantic kind," he cited the case of Bishop
Coxe. "To Hatton," Froude wrote in his text,+ "was given also the
Naboth's vineyard of his neighbour the Bishop of Ely." In a long note
he commented upon the Bishop's inclination to resist, and showed how
the "proud prelate" was "brought to reason by means so instructive on
Elizabeth's mode of conducting business when she had not Burghley or
Walsingham to keep her in order that" the whole account is given at
length in the words of Lord North, whom she employed for the purpose.
This letter from Lord North is extremely valuable evidence. Froude
read it and transcribed it from the collection of manuscripts at
Hatfield. As an idle rumour that Froude spent only one day at
Hatfield obtained currency after his death, it may be convenient to
mention here that the work which he did there in copying manuscripts
alone must have occupied him at least a month. Now let us see what
use Freeman made of the information thus given him by Froude.
"Meanwhile," he says in The Saturday Review for the 22nd of January,
1870, "Mr. Froude is conveniently silent as to the infamous tricks
played by Elizabeth and her courtiers in order to make estates for
court favourites out of Episcopal lands. A line or two of text is
indeed given to the swindling transaction by which Bishop Coxe of Ely
was driven to surrender his London house to Sir Christopher Hatton.
But why? Because the story gives Mr. Froude an opportunity of quoting
at full length a letter from Lord North to the Bishop in which all
the Bishop's real or pretended enormities are strongly set forth."
Here follows a short extract from the letter, in which North accused
Coxe of grasping covetousness. Now it is perfectly obvious to any one
having the whole letter before him, as Freeman had, that Froude
quoted it with the precisely opposite aim of denouncing the conduct
of Elizabeth to the Bishop, whom he compares with Naboth. Freeman
must have heard of Naboth. He must have known what Froude meant. Yet
the whole effect of his comments must have been to make the readers
of The Saturday Review think that Froude was attacking the Church,
when he was attacking the Crown for its conduct to the Church.
--
+ History of England, vol. xi. p. 321.
--
Freeman seemed to glory in his own deficiencies, and was almost as
proud of what he did not know as of what he did. Thus, for instance,
Froude, a born man of letters, was skilful and accomplished in the
employment of metaphors. Freeman could no more handle a metaphor than
he could fish with a dry fly. He therefore, without the smallest
consciousness of being absurd, condemned Froude for doing what he was
unable to do himself, and even wrote, in the name of The Saturday
Review, "We are no judges of metaphors," though there must surely
have been some one on the staff who knew something about them.
Froude had a mode of treating documents which is open to
animadversion. He did not, as Mr. Pollard happily puts it in the
Dictionary of National Biography, "respect the sanctity of inverted
commas." They ought to imply textual quotation, Froude used them for
his abridgments, openly proclaiming the fact that he had abridged,
and therefore deceiving no one. Freeman's comment upon this
irregularity is extremely characteristic. "Now we will not call this
dishonest; we do not believe that Mr. Froude is intentionally
dishonest in this or any other matter; but then it is because he does
not know what literary honesty and dishonesty are." There is no such
thing as literary honesty, or scientific honesty, or political
honesty. There is only one kind of honesty, and an honest man does
not misrepresent an opponent, as Freeman misrepresented Froude. To
call a man a liar is an insult. To say that is not a liar because he
does not know the difference between truth and falsehood is a
cowardly insult. But Froude was soon avenged. Freeman gave himself
into his adversary's hands. "Sometimes," he wrote,* "Mr. Froude gives
us the means of testing him. Let us try a somewhat remarkable
passage. He tells us "It had been argued in the Admiralty Courts that
the Prince of Orange, 'having his principality of his title in
France, might make lawful war against the Duke of Alva,* and that the
Queen would violate the rules of neutrality if she closed her ports
against his cruisers." Then follows a Latin passage from which the
English is paraphrased. "We presume," continues Freeman in fancied
triumph, "that the words put by Mr. Froude in inverted commas are
not Lord Burghiey's summary of the Latin extract in the note, but Mr.
Froude's own, for it is utterly impossible that Burghley could have
so misconceived a piece of plain Latin, or have so utterly
misunderstood the position of any contemporary prince." Presumption
indeed. I have before me a photograph of Burghley's own words in his
own writing examined by Froude at the Rolls House. They are "Question
whether the Prince of Orange, being a free prince of the Empire, and
also having his principality of his title in France, might not make a
just war against the Duke of Alva." Froude abridged, and wrote
"lawful" for "just." But the words which Freeman says that Burghley
could not have used are the words which he did use, and the
explanation is simple enough. Freeman was Freeman. Burghley was a
statesman. Burghley of course knew perfectly well that Orange was not
subject to the King of France, not part of his dominions, which is
Freeman's objection. He called it in France because it, and the Papal
possessions of Venaissin adjoining it, were surrounded by French
territory. He called it "in France," as we should call the Republic
of San Marino "in Italy" now. Freeman might have ascertained what
Burghley did write if he had cared to know. He did not care to know.
He was "belabouring Froude."
--
* Saturday Review, Nov. 24th, 1866.
--
Once Froude was weak enough to accept Freeman's correction on a small
point, only to find that Freeman was entirely in error, and that he
himself had been right all along. After much vituperative language
not worth repeating, Freeman wrote in The Saturday Review for the 5th
of February, 1870, these genial words, "As it is, there is nothing to
be done but to catch Mr. Froude whenever he comes from his hiding-
place at Simancas into places in which we can lie in wait for him."
The sneer at original research is characteristic of Freeman. One can
almost hear his self-satisfied laugh as he wrote this unlucky
sentence, "The thing is too grotesque to talk about seriously; but
can we trust a single uncertified detail from the hands of a man who
throughout his story of the Armada always calls the Ark Royal the Ark
Raleigh? ... It is the sort of blunder which so takes away one's
breath that one thinks for the time that it must be right. We do not
feel satisfied till we have turned to our Camden and seen 'Ark Regis'
staring us full in the face." Freeman did not know the meaning of
historical research as conducted by a real scholar like Froude.
Froude had not gone to Camden, who in Freeman's eyes represented the
utmost stretch of Elizabethan learning. If Freeman had had more
natural shrewdness, it might have occurred to him that the name of a
great seaman was not an unlikely name for a ship. But he could never
fall lightly, and heavily indeed did he fall on this occasion. With
almost incredible fatuity, he wrote, "The puzzle of guessing how
Mr. Froude got at so grotesque a union of words as 'Ark Raleigh'
fades before the greater puzzle of guessing what idea he attached to
the words 'Ark Raleigh' when he had got them together." When Freeman
was most hopelessly wrong he always began to parody Macaulay.
Corruptio optimi pessima. "Ark Raleigh" means Raleigh's ship, and
Froude took the name, "Ark Rawlie" as it was then spelt, from the
manuscripts at the Rolls House. He was of course right, and Freeman
was wrong. But that is not all. Freeman could easily have put himself
right if he had chosen to take the trouble. Edwards's Life of Raleigh
appeared in 1868, and a copy of it is in Freeman's library at Owens
College. Edwards gives an account of the Ark Raleigh, which was built
for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh advancing two hundred pounds.
Freeman, however, need not have read this book to find out the truth.
For "the Ark Raleigh" occurs fourteen times in a Calendar of
Manuscripts from 1581 to 1590, published by Robert Lemon in 1865.
When Freeman was brought to book, and taxed with this gross blunder,
he pleaded that he "did a true verdict give according to such
evidence as came before him." The implied analogy is misleading.
Jurymen are bound by their oaths, and by their duty, to find a
verdict one way or the other. Freeman was under no obligation to say
anything about the Ark Raleigh. Prudence and ignorance might well
have restrained his pen.
Two blots in Froude's History Freeman may, I think, be acknowledged
to have hit. One was intellectual; the other was moral. It was pure
childishness to suggest that Froude had never heard of the peine
forte et dure, and only invincible prejudice could have dictated such
a sentence as "That Mr. Froude's law would be queer might be taken as
a matter of course."* Still, it is true, and a serious misfortune,
that Froude took very little interest in legal and constitutional
questions. For, while they had not the same importance in the
sixteenth century as they had in the seventeenth, they cannot be
disregarded to the extent in which Froude disregarded them without
detracting from the value of his book as a whole. He did not sit
down, like Hallam, to write a constitutional history, and he could
not be expected to deal with his subject from that special point of
view. Freeman's complaint, which is quite just, was that he neglected
almost entirely the relations of the Crown with the Houses of
Parliament and with the courts of law. The moral blot accounts for a
good deal of the indignation which Froude excited in minds far less
jaundiced than Freeman's. No one hated injustice more than Froude.
But cruelty as such did not inspire him with any horror. No
punishment, however atrocious, seemed to him too great for persons
clearly guilty of enormous crimes. I have already referred to his
defence of the horrible Boiling Act which disgraced the reign and the
parliament of Henry VIII. The account of Mary Stuart's old and
wizened face as it appeared when her false hair and front had been
removed after her execution may be set down as an error of taste. But
what is to be said, on the score of humanity, for an historian who in
the nineteenth century calmly and in cold blood defended the use of
the rack? Even here Freeman's ingenuity of suggestion did not desert
him. After quoting part, and part only, of Froude's sinister apology,
he writes, "To all this the answer is very simple. Every time that
Elizabeth and her counsellors sent a prisoner to the rack they
committed a breach of the law of England."+ Any one who read this
article without reading the History would infer that Froude had
maintained the legality, as well as the expediency, of torture. That
is not true. What Froude says is, "A practice which by the law was
always forbidden could be palliated only by a danger so great that
the nation had become like an army in the field. It was repudiated on
the return of calmer times, and the employment of it rests a stain on
the memory of those by whom it was used. It is none the less certain,
however, that the danger was real and terrible, and the same causes
which relieve a commander in active service from the restraints of
the common law apply to the conduct of statesmen who are dealing with
organised treason. The law is made for the nation, not the nation for
the law. Those who transgress it do it at their own risk, but they
may plead circumstances at the bar of history, and have a right to be
heard." Thus Froude asserts as strongly and clearly as Freeman
himself that torture was in 1580, and always had been, contrary to
the law of England. On the purely legal and technical aspect of the
question a point might be raised which neither Froude nor Freeman has
attempted to solve. Would any Court in the reign of Elizabeth have
convicted a man of a criminal offence for carrying out the express
commands of the sovereign? If not, in what sense was the racking of
the Jesuits illegal? But there is a law of God, as well as a law of
man, and surely Elizabeth broke it. Froude's argument seems to prove
too much, if it proves anything, for it would justify all the worst
cruelties ever inflicted by tyrants for political objects, from the
burning of Christians who refused incense for the Roman Emperor to
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel.
--
* Saturday Review, Jan. 29th, 1870.
+ Saturday Review, Dec. 1st, 1867.
--
The analogy of a commander in active service is inadequate.
Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active
service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any
Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the
end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack
was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either
confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy
Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for
the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus
describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with
him in 1586. "They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the
letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony
was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due
precautions for the protraction of the pain. If it was to be taken as
part of the Catholic creed that to kill a prince in the interests of
Holy Church was an act of piety and merit, stern English common sense
caught the readiest means of expressing its opinion on the character
both of the creed and its professors."
Stern English common sense! To suggest that the English people had
anything to do with it is a libel on the English nation. Elizabeth
had the decency to forbid the repetition of such atrocities. That she
should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as
his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude's.
On the 12th of January, 1870, Freeman delivered in The Saturday
Review his final verdict on Froude's History of England from the Fall
of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is one of the most
preposterous judgments that ever found their way into print. In
knowledge of the subject, and in patient assiduity of research,
Froude was immeasurably Freeman's superior, and his life had been
devoted to historic studies. Yet this was the language in which the
editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to
write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died:
"He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name
has come to be used as a figure of speech, sometimes in strange
company with his betters .... But an historian he is not; four
volumes of ingenious paradox, eight volumes of ecclesiastical
pamphlet, do not become a history, either because of the mere number
of volumes, or because they contain a narrative which gradually
shrinks into little more than a narrative of diplomatic intrigues.
The main objections to Mr. Froude's book, the blemishes which cut it
off from any title to the name of history, are utter carelessness as
to facts and utter incapacity to distinguish right from wrong ....
That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and
small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil
in the pursuit of truth--the spirit without which history, to be
worthy of the name, cannot be written--is not in Mr. Froude's nature,
and it would probably be impossible to make him understand what it is ....
How far the success of the book is due to its inherent vices,
how far to its occasional virtues, is a point too knotty for us to
solve. The general reader and his tastes--why this thing pleases him
and the other thing displeases him--have ever been to us the proroundest
of mysteries. It is enough that on Mr. Froude's book, as
a whole, the verdict of all competent historical scholars has long
ago been given. Occasional beauties of style and narrative cannot be
allowed to redeem carelessness of truth, ignorance of law, contempt
for the first principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the
most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we
have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as
a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No
merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the
whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself
a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant
phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre de bonne
foy.'"*
--
* The Duke was not, as Freeman implies that he was, referring to Froude.
--
By a curious irony of fate or circumstance Freeman has unconsciously
depicted the frame of mind in which Froude approached historic
problems. "That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters
great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time
and toil in the pursuit of truth--the spirit without which history,
to be worthy of the name, cannot be written," was the dominant
principle of Froude's life and work. He had hitherto taken no notice
of the attacks in The Saturday Review. The errors pointed out in them
were of the most trivial kind, and mere abuse is not worth a reply.
But even Gibbon was moved from his philosophic calm when Mr. Somebody
of Something "presumed to attack not the faith but the fidelity of
the historian." Froude passed over in contemptuous silence
impertinent reflections upon his religious belief. His honesty was
now in set terms impugned, and on the 15th of February, 1870, he
addressed, through the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Frederick
Greenwood, a direct challenge to Mr. Philip Harwood, who had become
editor of The Saturday Review. After a few caustic remarks upon the
absurdity of the defects imputed to him, such as ignorance that
Parliament could pass Bills of Attainder, because he had said that
the House of Lords would not pass one in a particular case, he came
to close quarters with the imputation of bad faith. "I am," he said,
"peculiarly situated"--as Freeman of course knew--"towards a charge
of this kind, for nine-tenths of my documents are in manuscript, and
a large proportion of those manuscripts are in Spain. To deal as
fairly as I can with the public, I have all along deposited my
Spanish transcripts, as soon as I have done with them, in the British
Museum. The reading of manuscripts, however, is at best laborious.
The public may be inclined to accept as proved an uncontradicted
charge, the value of which they cannot readily test. I venture
therefore to make the following proposal. I do not make it to my
reviewer. He will be reluctant to exchange communications with me,
and the disinclination will not be on his side only. I address myself
to his editor. If the editor will select any part of my volumes, one
hundred, two hundred, three hundred pages, wherever he pleases, I am
willing to subject them to a formal examination by two experts, to be
chosen--if Sir Thomas Hardy will kindly undertake it--by the Deputy
Keeper of the Public Records. They shall go through my references,
line for line. They shall examine every document to which I have
alluded, and shall judge whether I have dealt with it fairly. I lay
no claim to be free from mistakes. I have worked in all through nine
hundred volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and
official, in five languages and in difficult handwritings. I am not
rash enough to say that I have never misread a word, or overlooked a
passage of importance. I profess only to have dealt with my materials
honestly to the best of my ability. I submit myself to a formal
trial, of which I am willing to bear the entire expense, on one
condition-that the report, whatever it be, shall be published word
for word in The Saturday Review."
The proposal was certainly a novel one, and could not in ordinary
circumstances have been accepted. But it is also novel to charge an
historian of the highest character and repute with inability to speak
the truth, or to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman,
signing himself "Mr. Froude's Saturday Reviewer," replied in The Pall
Mall Gazette. The challenge he left to the editor of The Saturday,
who contemptuously refused it, and he admitted that after all Froude
probably did know what a Bill of Attainder was. The rest of his
letter is a shuffle. "I have made no charge of bad faith against Mr.
Froude"--whom he had accused of not knowing what truth meant--"with
regard to any Spanish manuscripts, or any other manuscripts. All that
I say is, that as I find gross inaccuracies in Mr. Froude's book,
which he does not whenever I have the means of testing him which was
certainly not often--"I think there is a presumption against his
accuracy in those parts where I have not the means of testing him.
But this is only a presumption, and not proof. Mr. Froude may have
been more careful, or more lucky"--meaning less fraudulent, or more
skilful--"with the hidden wealth of Simancas than he has been with
regard to materials which are more generally accessible. I trust it
may prove so." If Freeman thought that he meant that, he must have
had singular powers of self-deception. "I have been twitted by men of
thought and learning"--whom he does not name--"for letting Mr. Froude
off too easily, and I am inclined to plead guilty to the charge. I do
not suppose that Mr. Froude wilfully misrepresents anything; the
fault seems to be inherent and incurable; he does not know what
historical truth is, or how a man should set about looking for it. As
therefore his book is not written with that regard for truth with
which a book ought to be written, I hold that I am justified in
saying that it is not 'un livre de bonne roy.'"
It is difficult to read this disingenuous farrago of insinuation even
now without a strong sense of moral contempt. But vengeance was
coming, and before many years were over his head Freeman had occasion
to remember the Hornfinn tag:
Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede poena claudo.
Froude himself took the matter very lightly. He had boldly offered
the fullest inquiry, and Freeman had not been clever enough to
shelter himself behind the plea that copies were not originals; he
did not know enough about manuscripts to think of it. The blunders he
had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his
antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved
Derreen.* "I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book-
twelve volumes--about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not
dotted and t's not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity
has discovered. Every one of the rascals has made a dozen blunders of
his own, too, while detecting one of mine." Skelton's own testimony
is worth citing, for, though a personal friend, he was a true
scholar. "We must remember that he was to some extent a pioneer, and
that he was the first (for instance) to utilise the treasures of
Simancas. He transcribed, from the Spanish, masses of papers which
even a Spaniard could have read with difficulty, and I am assured
that his translations (with rare exceptions) render the original with
singular exactness."+ And in the preface to his Maitland of
Lethington the same distinguished author says, "Only the man or woman
who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish material in the Record
Office can properly appreciate Mr. Froude's inexhaustible industry
and substantial accuracy. His point of view is very different from
mine; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the
intricacies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to
me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled." John Hill Burton, to
whose learning and judgment Freeman's were as moonlight unto
sunlight, and as water unto wine, concurred in Skelton's view, and
no one has ever known Scottish history better than Burton.
--
* June 21st, 1870.
+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 143.
--
Freeman's reckless and unscholarly attacks upon Froude produced no
effect upon his own master Stubbs, whom he was always covering with
adulation. From the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1876 Stubbs
pronounced Froude's "great book," as he called it, to be "a work of
great industry, power, and importance." Stubbs was as far as possible
from agreeing with Froude in opinion. An orthodox Churchman and a
staunch Tory, he never varied in his opposition to Liberalism, as
well ecclesiastical as political, and he had no sympathy with the
reformers. But his simple, manly, pious character was incapable of
supporting his cause by personal slander. Unlike Freeman, he had a
rich vein of racy humour, which he indulged in a famous epigram on
Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation. But he could
appreciate Froude's learning and industry, for he was a real student
himself.
The controversy between Froude and Freeman, however, was by no means
at an end, and I may as well proceed at once to the conclusion of it,
chronology notwithstanding. In the year 1877, Froude contributed to
The Nineteenth Century a series of papers on the Life and Times of
Thomas Becket, since republished in the fourth volume of his Short
Studies. Full of interesting information, the result of minute pains,
and excellent in style, they make no pretence to be, as the History
was, a work of original research. They are indeed founded upon the
Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, which Canon Robertson had
edited for the Master of the Rolls in the previous year. They were of
course read by every one, because they were written by Froude,
whereas Robertson's learned Introduction would only have been read by
scholars. Froude's conclusions were much the same as the erudite
Canon's. He did not pretend to know the twelfth century as he knew
the sixteenth, and he avowedly made use of another man's knowledge to
point his favourite moral that emancipation from ecclesiastical
control was a necessary stage in the development of English freedom.
He may have been unconsciously affected by his familiarity with the
quarrel between Wolsey and Henry VIII. in describing the quarrel
between Becket and Henry II. The Church of the middle ages discharged
invaluable functions which in later times were more properly
undertaken by the State. Froude sided with Henry, and showed, as he
had not much difficulty in showing, that there were a good many spots
on the robe of Becket's saintliness. The immunity of Churchmen, that
is, of clergymen, from the jurisdiction of secular tribunals was not
conducive either to morality or to order.
Froude's essays might have been forgotten, like other brilliant
articles in other magazines, if Freeman had let them alone. But the
spectacle of Froude presuming to write upon those earlier periods of
which The Saturday Review had so often and so dogmatically pronounced
him to be ignorant, drove Freeman into print. If he had disagreed
with Froude on the main question, the only question which matters
now, he would have been justified, and more than justified, in
setting out the opposite view. A defence of Becket against Henry, of
the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer,
would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as
Froude's own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and
Erastianism. There is a great deal more to be said for Becket than
for Wolsey; and though Freeman found it difficult to state any case
with temperance, he could have stated this case with power. But, much
as he disliked Froude, he agreed with him. "Looking," he wrote, "at
the dispute between Henry and Thomas by the light of earlier and of
later ages, we see that the cause of Henry was the right one; that
is, we see that it was well that the cause of Henry triumphed in the
long run." Nevertheless he rushed headlong upon his victim, and
"belaboured" Froude, with all the violence of which he was capable,
in The Contemporary Review. Hitherto his attacks had been anonymous.
Now for the first time he came into the open, and delivered his
assault in his own name. Froude's forbearance, as well as his own
vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring. The first
sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for
which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance.
"Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will
hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval
history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry
was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have
cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history
belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude
should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of
Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor
Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the
Rolls Series. That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public
was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique. For
Froude's style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to
Freeman, "had," as he kindly admitted, "its merits." Page after page
teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the
metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings.
"On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every
man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the
web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of
More and Fisher"; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question
not of morality, but of evidence. "Mr. Froude by his own statement
has not made history the study of his life," which was exactly what
he had done, and stated that he had done. "The man who insisted on
the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had
never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill
of Attainder."
Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page.
Immediately after charging Froude with "fanatical hatred towards the
English Church, reformed or unreformed"--though he was the great
champion of the Reformation--"a degree of hatred which must be
peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"-
like Freeman's bosom friend Green--he says that Froude "never reaches
so high a point as in several passages where he describes various
scenes and features of monastic life." But this could not absolve him
from having made a "raid" upon another man's period, from being a
"marauder," from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have
written about, though he had not. Froude had "an inborn and incurable
twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement
about any matter." "By some destiny which it would seem that he
cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds--at least
which all other readers find--in his book he invariably substitutes
another narrative out of his own head." "Very few of us can test
manuscripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment's
notice test references to manuscripts much nearer home." This is a
strange insinuation from a man who never tested a manuscript, seldom,
if ever, consulted a manuscript, and had declined Froude's challenge
to let his copies be compared with his abridgment. One grows tired of
transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes. Yet it is essential to
clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge
between Froude and his life-long enemy.
The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude's articles in
The Nineteenth Century was fantastic. "Emperors and Popes, Sicilian
Kings and Lombard Commonwealths, should be as familiar to him who
would write The Life and Times of Thomas Becket as the text of the
Constitutions of Clarendon or the relations between the Sees of
Canterbury and York." If Froude had written an elaborate History of
Henry II., as he wrote a History of Henry VIII., he would have
qualified himself in the manner somewhat bombastically described. But
even Lord Acton, who seemed to think that he could not write about
anything until he knew everything, would scarcely have prepared
himself for an article in The Nineteenth Century by mastering the
history of the world. And if Froude had done so, it would have
profited him little. He would have forgotten it, "with that calm
oblivion of facts which distinguishes him from all other men who have
taken on themselves to read past events." He would still have written
"whatever first came into his head, without stopping to see whether a
single fact bore his statements out or not." "Accurate statement of
what really happened, even though such accurate statement might serve
Mr. Froude's purpose, is clearly forbidden by the destiny which
guides Mr. Froude's literary career." These extracts from The
Contemporary Review are samples, and only samples, from a mass of
rhetoric not unworthy of the grammarian who prayed for the damnation
of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of
irregular verbs. Freeman, whose self-assertion was perpetual,
represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of
truth. His own reverence for truth he illustrated quaintly enough at
the close of his last article. "I leave others to protest," said this
veracious critic, "against Mr. Froude's treatment of the sixteenth
century. I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from
original sources." I leave others to protest! From 1864 to 1870
Freeman had continuously attacked successive volumes of Froude's
History in The Saturday Review. Yet he here makes in his own name a
statement quite irreconcilable with his ever having done anything of
the kind, and accompanies it with an admission which, if it had been
made in The Saturday Review, would have robbed his invective of more
than half its sting.
And now let us see what was the real foundation for this imposing
fabric. Freeman's boisterous truculence made such a deafening noise,
and raised such a blinding dust, that it takes some little time and
trouble to discover the hollowness of the charges. With four-fifths
of Froude's narrative he does not deal at all, except to borrow from
it for his own purposes, as he used to borrow from the History in The
Saturday Review. In the other fifth, the preliminary pages, he
discovered two misprints of names, one mistake of fact, and three or
four exaggerations. Not one of these errors is so grave as his own
statement, picked up from some bad lawyer, that "the preamble of an
Act of Parliament need not be received as of any binding effect." The
preamble is part of the Act, and gives the reasons why the Act was
passed. Of course the rules of grammar show that being explanatory it
is not an operative part; but it can be quoted in any court of
justice to explain the meaning of the clauses.
In his Annals of an English Abbey Froude allowed "Robert Fitzwilliam"
to pass for Robert Fitzwalter in his proofs, and upon this conclusive
evidence that Froude was unfit to write history Freeman pounced with
triumphant exultation. He had some skill in the correction of
misprints, and would have been better employed in revising proof-
sheets for Froude than in "belabouring" him. Froude said that
Becket's name "denoted Saxon extraction." An anonymous biographer,
not always accurate, says that both his parents came from Normandy.
It is probable, though by no means certain, that in this case the
biographer was right, and Froude corrected the mistake when, in
consequence of Freeman's criticisms, he republished the articles.
Froude, on the authority of Edward Grim, who knew Becket, and wrote
his Life, referred to the cruelty and ferocity of Becket's
administration as Chancellor. Freeman declared that "anything more
monstrous never appeared from the pen of one who professed to be
narrating facts." Froude not only "professed" to be narrating facts:
he was narrating them. The only question is whether they happened in
England, in Toulouse, or in Aquitaine. Freeman exposed his own
ignorance by alleging that Grim meant the suppression of the free
lances, which happened before Becket became Chancellor. He did not in
fact know the subject half so well as Froude, though Froude might
have more carefully qualified his general words. Froude's account of
Becket's appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, his
scruples, and how he overcame them, is described by Freeman as "pure
fiction." It was taken from William of Canterbury, and, though open
to doubt upon some points, is quite as likely to be true as the
narrative preferred by Freeman. The most serious error, indeed the
only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement
that Becket's murderers were shielded from punishment by the King.
Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be
tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop. It is
doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the
Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of
Becket's assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether.
Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly
wrong.
But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with
speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce. He
stooped to write the words, "Natural kindliness, if no other feeling,
might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work
of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a
brother's almost forgotten fame." The meaning of this sentence, so
far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment
on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends
published after his own premature death. If Froude had written
anonymously against this work, the phrase "stabs in the dark" would
have been intelligible. As he had written in his own name, and had
not mentioned his brother's work at all, part at least of the
accusation was transparently and obviously false.
At last, however, Freeman had gone too far. Froude had borne a great
deal, he could bear no more; and he took up a weapon which Freeman
never forgot. I can well recall, as can hundreds of others, the
appearance in The Nineteenth Century for April, 1879, of "A Few Words
on Mr. Freeman." They were read with a sense of general pleasure and
satisfaction, a boyish delight in seeing a big bully well thrashed
before the whole school. Froude was so calm, so dignified, so self-
restrained, so consciously superior to his rough antagonist in temper
and behaviour. Only once did he show any emotion. It was when he
spoke of the dastardly attempt to strike him through the memory of
his brother. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole
the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen
any person--not one--in whom, as I now think of him, the excellences
of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure. Of my
personal feeling towards him I cannot speak. I am ashamed to have
been compelled, by what I can only describe as an inexcusable insult,
to say what I have said." It was not difficult to show that Freeman's
four articles in The Contemporary Review contained worse blunders
than any he had attributed to Froude, as, for instance, the
allegation that Henry VIII., who founded bishoprics and organised the
defence of the country, squandered away all that men before his time
had agreed to respect. Easy also was it to disprove the charge of
"hatred towards the English Church at all times and under all
characters" by the mere mention of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and
Hooper. The statement that Froude had been a "fanatical votary" of
the mediaeval Church was almost delicious in the extravagance of its
absurdity; and it would have been impossible better to retort the
wild charges of misrepresentation, in which it is hard to suppose
that even Freeman himself believed, than by the simple words, "It is
true that I substitute a story in English for a story in Latin, a
short story for a long one, and a story in a popular form for a story
in a scholastic one." In short, Froude wrote a style which every
scholar loves, and every pedant hates. With a light touch, but a
touch which had a sting, Froude disposed of the nonsense which made
him translate praedictae rationes "shortened rations" instead of "the
foregoing accounts," and in a graver tone he reminded the public that
his offer to test the accuracy of his extracts from unprinted
authorities had been refused. Graver still, and not without
indignation, is his reference to Freeman's suggestion that he thought
the Cathedral Church of St. Albans had been destroyed. Most people,
when they finished Froude's temperate but crushing refutation, must
have felt the opportunity for it should ever surprised that have
arisen.
Froude had done his work at last, and done it thoroughly. Freeman's
plight was not to be envied. If his offence had been rank, his
punishment had been tremendous. Even The Spectator, which had
hitherto upheld him through thick and thin, admonished him that he
had passed the bounds of decency and infringed the rules of
behaviour. Dreading a repetition of the penalty if he repeated the
offence, fearing that silence would imply acquiescence in charges of
persistent calumny, he blurted out a kind of awkward half-apology. He
confessed, in The Contemporary Review for May, 1879, that he had
criticised in The Saturday all the volumes of Froude's Elizabeth.
This self-constituted champion proceeded to say that he knew nothing
about Froude's personal character, and that when he accused Froude of
stabbing his dead brother "in the dark" he only meant that the
brother was dead. When he says that Froude's article was "plausible,
and more than plausible," he is quite right. It is more than
plausible, because it is true. After vainly trying to explain away
some of the errors brought home to him by Froude, and leaving others
unnoticed, he complains, with deep and obvious sincerity, that Froude
had not read his books, nor even his articles in Encyclopaedias. He
exhibits a striking instance of his own accuracy. In his defence
against the rather absurd charge of not going, as Macaulay had gone,
to see the places about which he wrote, Froude pleaded want of means.
Freeman rejoined that Macaulay was at one time of his life
"positively poor." He was so for a very short time when his
Fellowship at Trinity came to an end. Unluckily for Freeman's
statement the period was before his appointment to be Legal Member of
Council in India, and long before he had begun to write his History
of England. The most charitable explanation of an erroneous statement
is usually the correct one, and it was probably forgetfulness which
made Freeman say that he did not hear of Froude's having placed
copies of the Simancas manuscripts in the British Museum till 1878,
whereas he had himself discussed it in The Pall Mall Gazette eight
years before. If Froude had made such an astonishing slip, there
would have been more ground for imputing to him an incapacity to
distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman's "Last Words on Mr.
Froude" show no sign of penitence or good feeling, and they end with
characteristic bluster about the truth, from which he had so
grievously departed. But Froude was never troubled with him again.
Although a refuted detractor is not formidable in the flesh, the evil
that he does lives after him. Freeman's view of Froude is not now
held by any one whose opinion counts; yet still there seems to rise,
as from a brazen head of Ananias, dismal and monotonous chaunt, "He
was careless of the truth, he did not make history the business of
his life." He did make history the business of his life, and he cared
more for truth than for anything else in the world. Freeman's
biographer has given no clue to his imperfect sympathy with Froude.
Green, true historian as he was, made more mistakes than Froude, and
the mistakes he did make were more serious. He trespassed on the
preserves of Brewer, who criticised him severely without deviating
from the standard of a Christian and a gentleman. Even over the
domain of Stubbs, and the consecrated ground of the Norman Conquest
itself, Green ranged without being Freemanised as a poacher. But then
Green was Freeman's personal friend, and in friendship Freeman was
staunch. They belonged to the same set, and no one was more cliquish
than Freeman. Liberal as he was in politics, he always professed the
utmost contempt for the general public, and wondered what guided
their strange tastes in literature. Dean Stephens has apparently
suppressed most of the references to Froude in Freeman's private
letters, and certainly he drops no hint of the controversy about
Becket. But the following passage from his "Concluding Survey" is
apparently aimed at Froude.
Freeman, we are told, "was unable to write or speak politely"--and if
the Dean had stopped there I should have had nothing to say; but he
goes on--"of any one who pretended to more knowledge than he really
had, or who enjoyed a reputation for learning which was undeserved;
nay, more, he considered it to be a positive duty to expose such
persons. In doing this he was often no doubt too indifferent to their
feelings, and employed language of unwarranted severity which
provoked angry retaliation, and really weakened the effect of his
criticism, by diverting public sympathy from himself to the object of
his attack. But it was quite a mistake to suppose, as many did, that
his fierce utterances were the outcome of ill-temper or of personal
animosity. He entertained no ill-will whatever towards literary or
political opponents."
There is more to the same effect, and of course Froude must have been
in Stephens's mind. But the reputation of a great historian is not to
be taken away by hints. It may suit Freeman's admirers to seek refuge
in meaningless generalities. Those who are grateful for Froude's
services to England, and to literature, have no interest in
concealment. Froude never "pretended to more knowledge than he really
had." So far from "enjoying a reputation for learning which was
undeserved," he disguised his learning rather than displayed it, and
wore it lightly, a flower. That Freeman should have "considered it to
be a positive duty to expose" a man whose knowledge was so much wider
and whose industry was so much greater than his own is strange. That
he did his best for years, no doubt from the highest motives, to
damage Froude's reputation, and to injure his good name, is certain.
With the general reader he failed. The public had too much sense to
believe Froude was merely, or chiefly, or at all, an ecclesiastical
pamphleteer. But by dint of noisy assertion, and perpetual
repetition, Freeman did at last infect academic coteries with the
idea that Froude was a superficial sciolist. The same thing had been
said of Macaulay, and believed by the same sort of people. Froude's
books were certainly much easier to read than Freeman's. Must they
therefore have been much easier to write? Two-thirds of Froude's
mistakes would have been avoided, and Freeman would never have had
his chance, if the former had had a keener eye for slips in his
proof-sheets, or had engaged competent assistance. When he allowed
Wilhelmus to be printed instead of Willelmus, Freeman shouted with
exultant glee that a man so hopelessly ignorant of mediaeval
nomenclature had no right to express an opinion upon the dispute
between Becket and the King. Nothing could exceed his transports of
joy when he found out that Froude did not know the ancient name of
Lisieux. Freeman thought, like the older Pharisees, that he should be
heard for his much speaking, and for a time he was. People did not
realise that so many confident allegations could be made in which
there was no substance at all. They thought themselves safe in making
allowance for Freeman's exaggeration, and Freeman simply bored many
persons into accepting his estimate of Froude. Perhaps he went a
little too far when he claimed to have found inaccuracies in Froude's
transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without knowing a word of
Spanish. But he was seldom so frank as that. It was not often that he
forgot his two objects of holding up Froude as the fluent, facile
ignoramus, and himself as the profound, erudite student.
Just after reading Freeman's furious articles on Becket, I turned to
Froude's "Index of Papers collected by me October, November, and
December, 1856." It covers twenty-one pages, very closely written,
and I will give a few extracts to show what sort of preparation this
sciolist thought necessary for his ecclesiastical pamphlet. The first
entry, representing four pages of text, is "Hanson's Description of
England. Diet, habits, prices of provisions from Parliamentary
History." Another is "Dress and loose habits of the London clergy in
1486. From Morton's Injunctions."
"State of the Abbey of St. Albans in 1489 shows that Froude was well
acquainted with that subject many years before he wrote his Short
Study on it. "The Bishops of all the Sees in England under Henry,
date of appointment, etc.," is another of these items, which also
comprise "Extracts from the so-called Privy Purse Expenses of Henry
VIII." "Bulla Clementis Papae VII. concessa Regi Henrico de Secundis
nuptiis. This contains the passage quocunque licito vel illicito
coitu." "Petition of the Upper House of Convocation for the
suppression of heretical books." "Royal Letter on the Articles of
1536 which were written, Henry says, by himself." "Elaborate and
extremely valuable State Papers on the Duchy of Milan, and the
dispute between the Emperor and Francis I." "Pole to James, the Fifth
Letter of Warning." "Pole to the Pope, May 18th, 1537. N.B.--Very
remarkable." "Remarkable State Paper drawn by Pole and addressed to
the Pope at the time of the interview at Paris between Francis and
the Emperor." "Privy Council to the Duke of Norfolk. Marquis of
Exeter to Sir A. Brown. Promise of money. Directions to send relief
to the Duke of Suffolk in Lincolnshire, etc." "Henry VIII. to the
Duke of Norfolk about November 27th, 1536. Part of it in his own
hand. High and chivalrous." "Curious account of the ferocity of the
clergy in Lincolnshire." "Curious questions addressed to Fisher
Bishop of Rochester on some treasonable foreign correspondence."
"Learned men to be sent to preach to the disaffected counties.
Henry's version of the causes of the insurrection---N.B., and the
cure." "Instructions to the Earl of Sussex for tranquillising the
North after the Insurrection. Long and curious--noticeable list of
accusations against the monastic bodies. In Wriothesley's hand." "Sir
Francis Bigod to Sir Robert Constable. Very remarkable account of his
unpopularity in the first rebellion from suspicion of heresy, January
18th, 1537." "Emperor at Paris, 1539. War between France and England.
Secret causes why the Emperor made a secret peace with France." "Lord
Lisle to Henry VIII. on his chance of running down the French fleet
as they lay at anchor, July 21st, 1545." "Losses of the old families
by the suppression--new foundation by Henry VIII. Bishoprics,
hospitals, colleges, etc." "The Abbot of Coggeshall hides jewels,
makes away goods, maintains Rome and consults the devil." "Henry
VIII. to Justices of the Peace, admonition for neglect of duty.
Highly in character." "King's Highness having discovered all the
enormities of the clergy, pardons all that is past, and exhorts them
to a Christian life in all time to come."
During the three months to which alone this list refers Froude must
have read and studied more than four hundred pages of important
documents. If any one wishes to form a correct judgment of Froude as
an historian, he can scarcely begin better than by reversing every
statement that Freeman felt it his duty to make. Froude came to write
about the sixteenth century after careful study of previous times. He
prepared himself for his task by patient research among letters and
manuscripts such as Freeman never thought of attempting. He neglected
no source of information open to him, and he obtained special
privileges for searching Spanish archives which entailed upon him the
severest labour. He studied not only at Simancas, where none had been
before him, but also in Paris, in Brussels, in Vienna. The documents
he read were in half a dozen languages, sometimes in the vilest
scrawls. Long afterwards he described his own experience in his own
graphic way. "Often at the end of a page," he said, "I have felt as
after descending a precipice, and have wondered how I got down. I had
to cut my way through a jungle, for no one had opened the road for
me. I have been turned into rooms piled to the window-sill with
bundles of dust-covered despatches, and told to make the best of it.
Often I have found the sand glistening on the ink where it had been
sprinkled when a page was turned. There the letter had lain, never
looked at again since it was read and put away." Out of such
materials Froude wrote a History which any educated person can read
with undisturbed enjoyment. He was too good an artist to let his own
difficulties be seen, and they were assumed not to exist. Froude did
not write, like Stubbs, for professional students alone; he wrote for
the general public, for those whom Freeman affected to despise. So
did Macaulay, whom Freeman idolised. So did Gibbon, the greatest
historian of all time. Froude's History covered the most
controversial period in the growth of the English Church. Lynx-eyed
critics, with their powers sharpened by partisanship, searched it
through and through for errors the most minute. Some of course they
found. But they did not find one which interfered with the main
argument, and such evidence as has since been discovered confirms
Froude's proposition that the cause of Henry was the cause of
England. Freeman's Norman Conquest has secured for him an honourable
fame; his attacks upon Froude, until they have been forgotten, will
always be a reproach to his memory.
It was with just pride, and natural satisfaction, that Froude wrote
to Lady Derby in May, 1890: "I am revising my English History for a
final edition. Since I wrote it the libraries and archives of all
Europe have been searched and sifted. I am fairly astonished to find
how little I shall have to alter. The book is of course young, but I
do not know that it is the worse on that account. That fault at any
rate I shall not try to cure."
The Divorce of Katharine of Aragon, though not published till 1891,
is a sequel to the History. The twenty years which had intervened
did not lead Froude to modify any of his main conclusions, and he was
able to furnish new evidence in support of them. The correspondence
of Chapuys, Imperial Ambassador at the court of Henry VIII., puts
Fisher's treason beyond doubt, and proves that the bishop was
endeavouring to procure an invasion by Spanish troops when the king,
in Freeman's language, "slaughtered" him. The next year Froude
brought out, in a volume with other essays, his Spanish Story of the
Armada, written in his raciest manner, and proving from Spanish
sources the grotesque incompetence of Medina Sidonia. There are few
better narratives in the language, and the enthusiastic admiration of
a great American humourist was as well deserved as it is charmingly
expressed.
"The other night," wrote Bret Harte, "I took up Longman's Magazine*
and began to lazily read something about the Spanish Armada. My
knowledge of that historic event, I ought to say, is rather hazy; I
remember a vague something about Drake playing bowls while the
Spanish fleet was off the coast, and of Elizabeth going to Tilbury en
grande tenue, but there was always a good deal of 'Jingo' shouting
and Crystal Palace fireworks about it, and it never seemed real. In
the article I was reading the style caught me first; I became
tremendously interested; it was a new phase of the old story, and yet
there was something pleasantly familiar. I turned to the last page
quickly, and saw your blessed name. I had heard nothing about it
before. Then I went through it breathlessly to the last word, which
came all too soon. And now I am as eager for the next instalment as I
was when a boy for the next chapter of my Dickens or Thackeray. Don't
laugh, dear old fellow, over my enthusiasm or my illustration, but
remember that I represent a considerable amount of average human
nature, and that's what we all write for, and ought to write for, and
be dashed to the critics who say to the contrary! I thought your
parallel of Philip and Don Quixote delightful, but the similitude of
Medina Sidonia and Sancho Panza is irresistible. That letter to
Philip is Sancho's own hand! Where did you get it? How long have you
had it up your sleeve? Have you got any more such cards to play? Can
you not give us a picture of those gentlemen adventurers with their
exalted beliefs, their actual experiences, their little jealousies,
and the love-lorn Lope de Vega in their midst? What mankind you have
come upon, dear Froude! How I envy you! Have you nothing to spare for
a poor literary man like myself, who has made all he could out of the
hulk of a poor old Philippine galleon on Pacific seas? Couldn't you
lend me a Don or a galley-slave out of that delightful crew of solemn
lunatics? And yet how splendid are those last orders of the Duke!
With what a swan-like song they sailed away!"
--
* The successor to Fraser.
--
The letter from Medina Sidonia to Philip, which reminded both Froude
and Bret Harte of Sancho Panza, is too delicious not to be given in
full.
"My health is bad, and from my small experience of the water I know
that I am always sea-sick. I have no money which I can spare, I owe a
million ducats, and I have not a real to spend on my outfit. The
expedition is on such a scale, and the object is of such high
importance, that the person at the head of it ought to understand
navigation and sea-fighting, and I know nothing of either. I have not
one of those essential qualifications. I have no acquaintance among
the officers who are to serve under me. Santa Cruz had information
about the state of things in England; I have none. Were I competent
otherwise, I should have to act in the dark by the opinion of others,
and I cannot tell to whom I may trust. The Adelantado of Castile
would do better than I. Our Lord would help him, for he is a good
Christian, and has fought in several battles. If you send me, depend
upon it, I shall have a bad account to render of my trust."*
--
* Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 19, 20.
--
"Those last orders of the Duke"--the same Duke, by the way--are
"splendid" enough of their kind. "From highest to lowest you are to
understand the object of our expedition, which is to recover countries
to the Church now oppressed by the enemies of the true faith. I
therefore beseech you to remember your calling, so that God may be
with us in what we do. I charge you, one and all, to abstain from
profane oaths, dishonouring to the names of our Lord, our Lady, and
the Saints. All personal quarrels are to be suspended while the
expedition lasts, and for a month after it is completed. Neglect of
this will be held as treason. Each morning at sunrise the ship-boys,
according to custom, will sing 'Good Morrow' at the foot of the
mainmast, and at sunset the 'Ave Maria.' Since bad weather may
interrupt the communications the watchword is laid down for each day
in the week: Sunday, Jesus; the days succeeding, the Holy Ghost, the
Holy Trinity, Santiago, the Angels, All Saints, and Our Lady."*
--
* Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 27, 28.
--
"God and one," it has been said, "make a majority." But in this case
God was not on the side of the pious and incompetent Medina Sidonia.
It was not till this same year 1892, after Freeman's death, that the
"Calendar of Letters and State Papers relative to English affairs
preserved principally in the Archives of Simancas" began to be
published in England by the Master of the Rolls. Translated by an
eminent scholar, Mr. Martin Hume, and printed in a book, they could
have been read by Freeman himself, and can be read by any one who
cares to undertake the task. They will at least give some idea of the
enormous labour undergone by Froude in his several sojourns at
Simancas. I cannot profess to have instituted a systematic
comparison, but a few specimens selected at random show that Froude
summarised fairly the documents with which he dealt. That there
should be some discrepancies was inevitable.
Philip II. wrote a remarkably bad hand, and his Ambassadors were not
chosen for their penmanship. The most striking fact in the case is
that Mr. Hume has derived assistance from Froude in the performance
of his own duties. "I have," he writes in his Introduction, "very
carefully compared the Spanish text when doubtful with Mr. Froude's
extracts and copies and with transcripts of many of the letters in
the British Museum." Nothing could give a better idea than this
sentence of the difficulties which Froude had to surmount, or of the
fidelity with which he surmounted them. He had not only achieved his
own object: he also smoothed the path of future labourers in the same
field. It was the inaccessibility of the records at Simancas that
enabled Freeman to accuse Froude of not correctly transcribing or
abstracting manuscripts. Like other people, he made mistakes; but
mistakes have to be weighed as well as counted, and even in
enumerating Froude's we must always remember that he used more
original matter than any other modern historian.