IRELAND AND AMERICA
Froude had made history the business of his life, and he had no
sooner completed his History of England than he turned his attention
to the sister people. The Irish chapters in his great book had been
picked out by hostile critics as especially good, and in them he had
strongly condemned the cruel misgovernment of an Englishman otherwise
so humane as Essex. While he was in Ireland he had examined large
stores of material in Dublin, which he compared with documents at the
Record Office in London, and he contemplated early in 1871, if not
before, a book on Irish history. For this task he was not altogether
well qualified. The religion of Celtic Ireland was repugnant to him,
and he never thoroughly understood it. In religious matters Froude
could not be neutral. Where Catholic and Protestant came into
conflict, he took instinctively, almost involuntarily, the Protestant
side. In the England of the sixteenth century the Protestant side was
the side of England. In Ireland the case was reversed, and the spirit
of Catholicism was identical with the spirit of nationality. Irish
Catholics to this day associate Protestantism with the sack of
Drogheda and Wexford, with the detested memory of Oliver Cromwell. To
Froude, as to Carlyle, Cromwell was the minister of divine vengeance
upon murderous and idolatrous Papists. His liking for the Irish,
though perfectly genuine, was accompanied with an underlying contempt
which is more offensive to the objects of it than the hatred of an
open foe. He regarded them as a race unfit for self-government, who
had proved their unworthiness of freedom by not winning it with the
sword. If they had not quarrelled among themselves, and betrayed one
another, they would have established their right to independence; or,
if there had been still an Act of Union, they could have come in, as
the Scots came, on their own terms. For an Englishman to write the
history of Ireland without prejudice he must be either a cosmopolitan
philosopher, or a passionless recluse. Froude was an ardent patriot,
and his early studies in hagiology had led him to the conclusion, not
now accepted, that St. Patrick never existed at all. His scepticism
about St. Patrick might have been forgiven to a man who had probably
not much belief in St. George. But Froude could not help running amok
at all the popular heroes of Ireland. In the first of his two papers
describing a fortnight in Kerry he went out of his way to depreciate
the fame of Daniel O'Connell. "Ireland," he wrote, "has ceased to
care for him. His fame blazed like a straw bonfire, and has left
behind it scarce a shovelful of ashes. Never any public man had it in
his power to do so much good for his country, nor was there ever one
who accomplished so little."*
--
* Short Studies, vol. ii. p. 241.
--
That O'Connell wasted much time in clamouring for Repeal is perfectly
true. But he was as much the author of Catholic Emancipation as
Cobden was the author of Free Trade, and that fact alone should have
debarred Froude from the use of this extravagant language. For though
an article in Fraser's Magazine is a very different thing from a
serious history, print imposes some obligations, and even two or
three casual sentences may show the bent of a man's mind. Whatever
Froude wrote on Ireland, or on anything else, was sure to be widely
read, and to affect, for good or for evil, the opinion of the British
public. It was therefore peculiarly incumbent on him not to flatter
English pride by wounding Irish self-respect.
While Froude was writing his English in Ireland he received an
invitation to give a series of lectures in the United States. "The
Yankees," he says to Skelton,+ "have written to me about going over
to lecture to them. I am strongly tempted; but I could not tell the
truth about Ireland without reflecting in a good many ways on my own
country. I don't fancy doing that, however justly, to amuse Jonathan."
These words certainly do not show implacable bitterness
against Ireland. Brought face to face with responsibility, Froude
always felt the weight of it, and he was never consciously unfair. He
was under a strong sense of obligation, which he felt bound to
fulfil. It is impossible not to admire the chivalrous and intrepid
spirit with which he undertook singlehanded to justify the conduct of
his countrymen before the American people, and to persuade them that
England had provocation for her treatment of Ireland. Once convinced
that his cause was righteous, he never flinched. He believed that
false views of the Irish question prevailed in America, and that he
could set them right. He did not altogether underrate the magnitude
of the enterprise. "I go like an Arab of the desert," he wrote to
Skelton a little later: "my hand will be against every man, and
therefore every man's hand will be against me."* A belief in
Ireland's wrongs was part of the American creed, like the
faithlessness of Charles II. and the tyranny of George III. Irish
Americans had enormous influence at elections, in Congress, and in
the newspapers. Released Fenians, O'Donovan Rossa among them, had
been spreading what they called the light, and their own countrymen
at all events believed what they said. The American people as a whole
were not unfriendly to England. The Alabama Arbitration and the Geneva
Award had destroyed the ill feeling that remained after the
fall of Richmond. But it was not worth the while of any American
politician to alienate the Irish vote, and most Americans honestly
thought, not without reason, that the policy of England in Ireland
had been abominable. To let sleeping dogs lie might be wise. Once
they were unchained, no American hand would help to chain them up
again. Froude, however, conceived that circumstances were unusually
favourable. The Irish Church had been disestablished, and the Fenian
prisoners had been set free. The Irish Land Act of 1870 had
recognised the Irish tenant's right to a partnership in the soil.
Although Froude had no sympathy, ecclesiastical or political, with
Gladstone, he did think that the Land Act was a just and beneficent
measure from which good would come. In the firm belief that he could
vindicate the statesmanship of his own country before American
audiences without sacrificing the paramount claims of truth and
justice, he accepted the invitation.
--
+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 149.
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 151.
--
After a summer cruise in a big schooner with his friend Lord Ducie,
whose hospitality at sea he often in coming years enjoyed, Froude
sailed from Liverpool in the Russia at the end of September, 1872,
with the distinguished physicist John Tyndall. He was a good sailor,
and loved a voyage. In his first letter to his wife from American
soil he describes a storm with the delight of a schoolboy.
"On Saturday morning it blew so hard that it was scarcely possible to
stand on deck. The wind and waves dead ahead, and the whole power of
the engines only just able to move the ship against it. It was the
grandest sight I ever witnessed--the splendid Russia, steady as if
she were on a railway, holding her straight course without yielding
one point to the sea--up the long hill-sides of the waves and down
into the troughs--the crests of the sea all round as far as the eye
could reach in one wild whirl of foam and spray. It was worth coming
into the Atlantic to see--with the sense all the time of perfect
security."
Froude's visit was in one respect well timed. President Grant had
just been assured of his second term, and even politicians had
leisure to think of their famous guest. He was at once invited to a
great banquet in New York, and found himself lodged with sumptuous
hospitality in a luxurious hotel at the expense of the Bureau which
had organised the lectures. One newspaper quaintly described him as
"looking like a Scotch farmer, with an open frank face and calm mild
eyes." His History was well known, for the Scribners had sold a
hundred and fifty thousand copies. His opinions were of course freely
invited, and he did not hesitate to give them. "I talk much Toryism
to them all, and ridicule the idea of England's decay, or of our
being in any danger of revolution; and with Colonies and India and
Commerce, etc., I insist that we are just as big as they are, and
have just as large a future before us." Both Froude and his hosts
might have remembered with advantage Disraeli's fine saying that
great nations are those which produce great men. But the sensual
idolatry of mere size is almost equally common on both sides of the
Atlantic.
The banquet was given by Froude's American publishers, the Scribners,
and his old acquaintance Emerson was one of the company. Another was
a popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, and a third was the present
Ambassador of the United States in London, Mr. Whitelaw Reid. In his
speech Froude referred to the object of his visit. He had heard at
home that "one of the most prominent Fenian leaders," O'Donovan
Rossa, "was making a tour in the United States, dilating upon English
tyranny and the wrongs of Ireland." That Froude should cross the seas
to confute O'Donovan Rossa must have struck the audience as scarcely
credible, until he explained his mission, for as such he regarded it,
by asserting that "the judgment of America has more weight in Ireland
than twenty batteries of English cannon." When the Irish had the
management of their own affairs, he continued, the result was
universal misery. They could not govern themselves in the sixteenth
century; therefore they could not govern themselves in the
nineteenth. If American opinion would only tell the Irish that they
had no longer any grievances which legislation could redress, the
Irish would believe it, and all would be well.
Though courteously treated as a representative Englishman, Froude had
of course no official position, and he hoped that as a private
individual his voice might be heard. But, while there were thousands
of native Americans who had no love for their Irish fellow-citizens,
there were very few indeed who cared to take up England's case
against Ireland. The Democratic party were inclined to sympathise
with Home Rule as being a mild form of Secession, and the Republican
party did not see why Ireland should be refused the qualified
independence enjoyed by every State of the Union. In these
unfavourable circumstances Froude delivered his first lecture. He
made a good point when he described the Irish peasant in Munster or
Connaught looking to America as his natural protector. "There is not
a lad," he exclaimed, "in an Irish national school who does not pore
over the maps of the States which hang on the walls, gaze on them
with admiration and hope, and count the years till he too shall set
his foot in those famous cities which float before his imagination
like the gardens of Aladdin." Nevertheless he asked his hearers and
readers to take it from him that Ireland had no longer any good
ground of complaint against the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Independence she could not have, and that not because the interests
of Great Britain forbade it, which would have been an intelligible
argument, but because she was unfit for it herself.
"If I were to sum up in one sentence the secret of Ireland's
misfortunes, I should say it lay in this: that while from the first
she has resisted England, complained of England, appealed to heaven
and earth against the wrongs which England has inflicted on her, she
has ever invited others to help her, and has never herself made an
effective fight for her own rights .... A majority of hustings votes
might be found for a separation. The majority would be less
considerable if instead of a voting-paper they were called to handle
a rifle."
To tell Irishmen that they could obtain liberty by fighting for it,
and would never get it in any other way, was not likely to conciliate
them, or to promote the cause of peace. Froude's appeal to American
opinion, however, was more practical.
"The Irishman requires to be ruled, but ruled as all men ought to be,
by the laws of right and wrong, laws which shall defend the weak from
the strong and the poor from the rich. When the poor peasant is
secured the reward of his own labour, and is no longer driven to the
blunderbuss to save himself and his family from legalised robbery, if
he prove incorrigible then, I will give him up. But the experiment
remains to be made."
An example had been set by Gladstone in the Land Act, and that was
the path which further legislation ought to follow. So far there
would not be much disagreement between Froude and most Irish
Americans. Rack-renting upon the tenants' improvements was the bane
of Irish agriculture, and the Act of 1870 was precisely what Froude
described it, a partial antidote. Then the lecturer reverted to
ancient history, to the Annals of the Four Masters, and the Danish
invasion. The audience found it rather long, and rather dull, even
though Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick were all built
by the Danes. But a foundation had to be laid, and Froude felt bound
also to make it clear that he did not take the old Whig view of
Government as a necessary evil, or swear by the "dismal science" of
Adam Smith.
He concluded his first lecture in words which at once defined his
position and challenged the whole Irish race. "It was not tyranny,"
he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English
authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving
Ireland to herself which she demands so passionately that was the
cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that
he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that
the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for
instruction, but to look out for mistakes. An article in The New York
Tribune, which spoke of Froude with admiration and esteem, told him
plainly enough how it would be. "We have had historical lecturers
before, but never any who essayed with such industry, learning, and
eloquence to convince a nation that its sympathies for half a century
at least have have been misplaced .... The thesis which he only
partly set out for the night--that the misfortunes of Ireland are
rather due to the congenital qualities of the race than to wrongs
inflicted by their conquerors--will excite earnest and perhaps bitter
controversy." This prediction was abundantly fulfilled, and the
controversy spoiled the tour. A friendly and sympathetic journalist
questioned Froude's "wisdom in coming before our people with this
course of lectures on Irish history ... We do not care for the
domestic troubles of other nations, and it is a piece of impertinence
to thrust them upon our attention. Mr. Froude knows perfectly well
that England would resent, and rightfully, the least interference on
our part with her Irish policy or her Irish subjects."
In this criticism there is a large amount of common sense, and
Froude would have done well to think of it before. He was not,
however, a man to be put down by clamour; he was sustained by the
fervour of his convictions, and it was too late for remonstrance.
His lectures had all been carefully prepared, and he went steadily
on with them. The unusual charge of dullness, which had been made
against some passages in his opening discourse, was never made
again. The lectures became a leading topic of conversation, and a
subject of fierce attack. Without fear, and in defiance of his
critics, he dashed into the reign of Henry VIII., "the English Blue
Beard, whom I have been accused of attempting to whitewash." "I
have no particular veneration for kings," he said. "The English
Liturgy speaks of them officially as most religious and gracious.
They have been, I suppose, as religious and gracious as other men,
neither more nor less. The chief difference is that we know more of
kings than we know of other men." Henry had a short way with
absentees. He took away their Irish estates, "and gave them to
others who would reside and attend to their work. It would have been
confiscation doubtless," beyond the power of American Congress,
though not of a British Parliament. "If in later times there had
been more such confiscations, Ireland would not have been the worse
for it." Here, then, Froude was on the side of the Irish. Here, as
always, he was under the influence of Carlyle. His ideal form of
government was an enlightened despotism, with a ruler drawn after
the pattern of children's story-books, who would punish the wicked
and reward the good. Froude never consciously defended injustice, or
tampered with the truth. His faults were of the opposite kind. He
could not help speaking out the whole truth as it appeared to him,
without regard for time, place, or expediency. If he could have
defended England without attacking Ireland, all would have been
well, but he could not do it. For his defence of England, stated
simply, was that Ireland had always been, and still remained,
incapable of managing her own affairs. "Free nations, gentlemen, are
not made by playing at insurrection. If Ireland desires to be a
nation, she must learn not merely to shout for liberty, but to fight
for it" against a bigger nation with a standing army in which many
Irishmen were enlisted. The Irish are a sensitive as well as a
generous race; and they feel taunts as much as more substantial
wrongs. When the first British statesman of his time, not a Roman
Catholic, nor, as the Irish would have said, a Catholic at all, had
denounced the upas, or poison, tree of Protestant ascendency, and
had cut off its two principal branches, Froude wasted his breath in
telling the American Irish, or the American people, that Gladstone
did not know what he was talking about. The Irish Church Act, the
Irish Land Act, the release of the Fenians, appealed to them as
honest measures of justice and conciliation. There was nothing
conciliatory in Froude's language, and they did not think it just.
From the purely historical point of view he had much to say for
himself, as, for instance:
"The Papal cause in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all
in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons,
and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in
Ireland it assumed the accidental form of the defence of the freedom
of opinion."
Perhaps not. Ireland, for good or for evil, was connected with
England, and when England was at war with the Pope she was at war
with him in Ireland as elsewhere. The argument, however, is double-
edged. The Papal cause being no longer, for various reasons, the
cause of stake and gibbet, how could there be the same ground for
restricting freedom of opinion in Ireland, for passing Coercion
Acts, for refusing Home Rule? As Froude himself said, "Popery now
has its teeth drawn. It can bark, but it can no longer bite." "The
Irish generally," he went on, "were rather superstitious than
religious." These. are delicate distinctions. "The Bishop of
Peterborough must understand," said John Bright on a famous
occasion, "that I believe in holy earth as little as he believes in
holy water." Elizabeth's Irish policy was to take advantage of local
factions, and to maintain English supremacy by setting them against
each other. "The result was hideous. The forty-five glorious years
of Elizabeth were to Ireland years of unremitting wretchedness."
Nobody could complain that Froude spared the English Government. If
he had been writing history, or rather when he was writing it, the
mutual treachery of the Irish could not be passed over. "Alas and
shame for Ireland," said Froude in New York. "Not then only, but
many times before and after, the same plan [offer of pardon to
murderous traitors] was tried, and was never known to fail. Brother
brought in the dripping head of brother, son of father, comrade of
comrade. I pardon none, said an English commander, until they have
imbued their hands in blood." The revival of such horrors on a
public platform could serve no useful purpose. They could not be
pleaded as an apology for England, and they inflamed, instead of
soothing, the animosities which Froude professed himself anxious to
allay. Yet he never lost sight of justice. On Elizabeth he had no
mercy. He made her responsible for the slaughter of men, women, and
children by her officers, for first neglecting her duties as ruler,
and then putting down rebellion by assassination. The plantation of
Ulster by 'James I., and the accompanying forfeiture of Catholic
estates, he defended on the ground that only the idle rich were
dispossessed. This is of course socialism pure and simple. James
I.'s own excuse was that Tyrone and Tyrconnell, who owned the
greater part of Ulster between them, had been implicated in the
Gunpowder Plot. If they were, the loss of their lands was a very
mild penalty indeed.
On the rebellion of 1641, which led to Cromwell's terrible
retribution, Froude touched lightly. Although the number of
Protestants who perished in the massacre has been exaggerated, the
attempts of Catholic historians to deny it, or explain it away, are
futile. Sir William Petty's figure of 38,000 is as well
authenticated as any. Froude of course justifies Cromwell for
putting, eight years afterwards, the garrisons of Drogheda and
Wexford to the sword. His characteristic intrepidity was never more
fully shown than in these appeals to American opinion against the
Irish race and creed. Unfortunately the practical result of them was
the reverse of what he intended. He preached the gospel of force.
Thus he expressed it in reply to Cromwell's critics: "I say frankly,
that I believe the control of human things in this world is given to
the strong, and those who cannot hold their own ground with all
advantage on their side must bear the Consequences of their
weakness." The Holy Inquisition, might have used this language in
Italy or in Spain. Any tyrant might use it at any time. It was
denied in anticipation by an older and higher authority than Carlyle
in the words "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to
the strong." There is a better morality, if indeed there be a worse,
than reverence for big battalions.
Sceptre and crown
Must topple down,
And in the earth be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.
Froude seldom did things by halves, and his apology for Cromwell is
not half-hearted. He applauds the celebrated pronouncement, "I
meddle with no man's conscience; but if you mean by liberty of
conscience, liberty to have the mass, that will not be suffered
where the Parliament of England has power." A great deal has
happened since Cromwell's time, and the mass is no longer the symbol
of intolerance, if only because the Church of Rome has no power to
persecute. Cromwell would have had a short shrift if he had fallen
into the hands of mass-goers. To tolerate intolerance is a Christian
duty, and therefore possible for an individual. Whether it was
possible for the Lord General in 1650 is a question hardly suited
for popular treatment on a public platform. All that he did was
right in Froude's eyes, including the prescription of "Hell or
Connaught" for "the men whose trade was fighting, who had called
themselves lords of the soil," and the abolition of the Irish
Parliament. "I as an Englishman," said Froude, "honour Cromwell and
glory in him as the greatest statesman and soldier our race has
produced. In the matter we have now in hand I consider him to have
been the best friend, in the best sense, to all that was good in
Ireland." This is of course an opinion which can honestly be held.
But to the Irish race all over the world such language is an
irritating defiance, and they simply would not listen to any man who
used it.
The expulsion of Presbyterians under Charles II. was foolish as well
as cruel, for it deprived the English Government in Ireland of their
best friends, and supplied the American colonies with some of their
staunchest soldiers in the War of Independence. Enough were left,
however, to immortalise the siege of Derry, while the native Irish
failed to distinguish themselves, or, in plain English, ran away, at
the Battle of the Boyne, and the defeat of James II. was recognised
by the Treaty of Limerick. An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was
accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under
Charles II. The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the
episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and
forcible terms by Froude. Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his
vigilant eye. "I believe," he said, "Bishops have produced more
mischief in this world than any class of officials that have ever
been invented." The petition of the Irish Parliament for union with
England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought;
Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the
commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that
smuggling thrived better than any other trade. The country was
pillaged by absent landlords, and "the mere hint of an absentee tax
was sufficient to throw the younger Pitt into convulsions." The
Irish Protestant Bishops provoked the savage satire of Swift, who
doubted not that excellent men had been appointed, and only deplored
that they should be personated by scoundrels who had murdered them
on Hounslow Heath.
These lectures stung the Irish to the quick, and gave much
embarrassment to Froude's American friends. The Irish found a
powerful champion in Father Burke, the Dominican friar, who had been
a popular preacher at Rome, and with an audience of his own Catholic
countrymen was irresistible. Burke was not a well informed man, and
his knowledge of history was derived from Catholic handbooks. But
the occasion did not call for dry facts. Froude had not been
passionless, and what the Irish wanted in reply was the rhetorical
eloquence which to the Father was second nature. Burke, however, had
the good taste and good sense to acknowledge that Froude suffered
from nothing worse than the invincible prejudice which all Catholics
attribute to all Protestants. As a Protestant and an Englishman,
Froude could not be expected to give such a history of Ireland as
would be agreeable to Irishmen. "Yet to the honour of this learned
gentleman be it said that he frankly avows the injuries which have
been done, and that he comes nearer than any man whom I have ever
heard to the real root of the remedy to be applied to these evils."
When his handling of documentary evidence was criticised, Froude
repeated his challenge to the editor of The Saturday Review, which
had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of
fair play gave judgment in his favour. But how was public opinion to
pronounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian II.,
granting Ireland to Henry II of England? The Bull was not in
existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all.
Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by
later Bulls of succeeding Popes. The matter had no interest for
Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore. Burke had
more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian massacres
of Such 1649. Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a
single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter
of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked
upon heretics. The combat was not so much unequal as impossible. There
was no common groud. Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if
he were a Protestant. His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted
alike for its eloquence and its justice. "In those singular labyrinths
of intrigue and treachery," meaning the secret correspondence at the
Castle, "I have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in
patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and
scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the
reputation of Henry Grattan. I say nothing of the temptations to which
he was exposed. There were no honours with which England would not
have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not
have paid to have silenced or subsidised him. He was one of those
perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind.
They passed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to
turn his back on them. In every step of his life he was governed
simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his
country." Grattan's Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a
dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion
of 1798. It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever
sat within its walls. Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by
the "delirium of nationality," and the true Irish statesman of his
time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, whose name is only less
abhorred by Irish Nationalists than Cromwell's own. Americans did not
think nationality a delirium, and their ideal of statesmanship was not
represented by Lord Clare.
The fifth and last of Froude's American lectures was reprinted in
Short Studies with the title of "Ireland since the Union."* It has a
closer bearing upon current politics than the others, and it runs
counter to American as well as to Irish sentiment. "Suppose in any
community two-thirds who are cowards vote one way, and the remaining
third will not only vote, but fight the other way." The argument has
often been used against woman's suffrage. One obvious answer is that
women, like men, would vote on different sides. In a community where
two-thirds of the adult male population were cowards problems of
government would doubtless assume a secondary importance, and that
there are limits to the power of majorities no sane Constitutionalist
denies.
--
* Vol. ii. pp, 515-598.
--
Short of making Carlyle Dictator of the Universe, Froude suggested
no alternative to the ballot-box of civilised life. This last
lecture, however, is chiefly remarkable for the rare tribute which
it pays to the services of the Catholic priesthood. Father Burke
himself must have been melted when he read, "Ireland is one of the
poorest countries in Europe. There is less theft, less cheating,
less house-breaking, less robbery of all sorts, than in any country
of the same size in the world. In the wild district where I lived we
slept with unlocked door and open windows, with as much security as
if we had been--I will not say in London or New York, I should be
sorry to try the experiment in either place: I will say as if we had
been among the saints in Paradise. In the sixteenth century the
Irish were notoriously regardless of what is technically morality.
For the last hundred years at least impurity has been almost unknown
in Ireland. And this absence of vulgar crime, and this exceptional
delicacy and modesty of character, are due alike, to their ever-
lasting honour, to the influence of the Catholic clergy." That is
the testimony of an opponent, and it is emphatic testimony indeed.
To O'Connell Froude is again conspicuously unjust, and his remark
that "a few attacks on handfuls of the police, or the blowing in of
the walls of an English prison . . . will not overturn an Empire" is
open to the observation that they disestablished a Church. When
Froude came to practical politics, he always seemed to be "moving
about in worlds not realised." His statement that national education
in Ireland was the best that existed in any part of the Empire
almost takes one's breath away, and the idea that no Irish
legislature would have passed the Land Act is a strange fantasy
indeed. Whether an Irish Parliament could be trusted to deal fairly
by the landlords is an open question. That it would fail to consider
the interests of the tenants is unthinkable. Froude was on much
firmer ground when he employed the case of Protestant Ulster, the
Ulster of the Plantation, as an argument against Home Rule. Those
Protestants would, he said, fight rather than submit to a Catholic
majority, and England could not assent to shooting them down. There
is only one real answer to this objection, and that is that
Protestant Ulster would do nothing of the kind. A logical method of
reconciling contradictory prophecies has never been found. In 1872
Home Rule had no support in England, and even in Ireland the
electors were pretty equally divided. Froude did not lay hold of the
American mind, as he might have done, by showing the inapplicability
of the Federal System which suits the United States to the
circumstances of the United Kingdom.
The impression made by Froude upon his audiences in New York is
graphically described by an American reporter.
"Mr. Froude improved very much in delivery and manner during this
course of lectures .... In his earlier lectures his ways were
awkward, his speech was too rapid, and he did not know what in world
to do with his hands. It was quite to see him run them under his
coat tails, spread them across his shirt front, stick them in his
breeches pockets, twirl them in the arm-holes his vest, or hold them
behind his back. He has now found out how to dispose of them in a
more or less natural way. His delivery is less rapid, his voice
better modulated, and his enunciation more distinct .... One of his
most effective peculiarities, in inviting the attention of his
hearers, is the exceeding earnestness of the manner of his address.
This earnestness is not like that of rant. It is the result of his
own strong conviction and his desire to impress others." That is a
fair and unprejudiced estimate of Froude as he appeared to a trained
observer who took neither side in the dispute. Many Irishmen shook
hands with him, and thanked him for his plain speaking. Bret Harte
told him that even those who dissented most widely from his opinions
admired his "grit." But politicians had to think of the Irish vote,
and the proprietors of newspapers could not ignore their Catholic
subscribers. The priests worked against him with such effect that
Mr. Peabody's servants in Boston, who were Irish Catholics,
threatened to leave their places if Froude remained as a guest in
their master's house. Father Burke, who had begun politely enough,
became obstreperous and abusive. Froude's life was in danger, and he
was put under the special protection of the police. The English
newspapers, except The Pall Mall Gazette, gave him no support, and
The Times treated his enterprise as Quixotic. A preposterous rumour
that he received payment from the British Ministry obtained
circulation among respectable persons in New York. He had intended
to visit the Western States, but the project was abandoned in
consequence of growing Irish hostility which made him feel that
further effort would be useless. It was not that he thought his
arguments refuted, or capable of refutation. He had considered them
too long, and too carefully, for that. But the well had been
poisoned. The malicious imputation of bribery was caught up by the
more credulous Irish, and their priests warned them that they would
do wrong in listening to a heretic. As for the American people, they
had no mind to take up the quarrel. It was no business of theirs.
Some extracts from Froude's letters to his wife will show how much
he enjoyed American hospitality, and how far he appreciated American
character. "I was received on Saturday," he wrote from New York on
the 4th of October, 1872, "as a member of the Lotus Club--the wits
and journalists of New York. It was the strangest scene I ever was
present at. They were very clever--very witty at each other's
expense, very complimentary to me; and, believe me, they worked the
publishers who were present for the profit they were making out of
me." He was agreeably surprised by the merchant princes of New York.
"There is absolutely no vulgarity about them. They are immensely
rich, but simple, and rather elaborately 'religious' in the forms of
their lives. A very long grace is always said before dinner. In this
and many ways they are totally unlike what I expected." Again, after
a description of Cornell's University, he says, "There is Mr.
Cornell, who has made all this, living in a little poky house in a
street with a couple of maids, his wife and daughters dressed in the
homeliest manner. His name will be remembered for centuries as
having spent his wealth in the very best institutions on which a
country's prosperity depends. Our people spend their fortunes in
buying great landed estates to found and perpetuate their own
family. I wonder which name will last the longest, Mr. Cornell's or
Lord Overstone's." "There is no such thing," he says elsewhere, "as
founding a family, and those who save good fortunes have to give
them to the public when they die for want of a better use to put
them to."
With sincerely religious people, especially if they were
Evangelicals, Froude felt deep sympathy. Patronage of religion he
detested, most of all the form of it which prescribes religion for
other people. An American philosopher called, and told him that,
having failed to find a new creed, he thought the old superstitions
had better be kept up, Popery for choice. "This," remarks Froude,
"is what I call want of faith. If you can believe that what you are
convinced is a lie may nevertheless exert a wholesome moral
influence on people, and that, whether true or not, or rather though
certainly not true, it is good to be preserved and taken up with,
you are to all practical purposes an atheist."
While he was at Boston Froude saw a great fire, and his description
of it is hardly inferior to the best things in his best books. He
was staying with George Peabody, equally well known in England and
the United States as a philanthropist, "one of the sweetest and
gentlest of beings." "As we were sitting after dinner, the children
said there was a fire somewhere. They heard the alarm bell, and saw
a red light in the sky. Presently we saw flames. Mr. Peabody was
uneasy, and I walked out with him to see. Between the house here and
the town lies the Common or City Park. As we crossed this, the signs
became more ominous. We made our way into the principal street
through the crowd, and then, looking down a cross street full of
enormous warehouses, saw both sides of it in flames. The streets
were full of steam fire-engines, all roaring and playing, but the
houses were so high and large, and the volumes of fire so
prodigious, that their water-jets looked like so many squirts. As we
stood, we saw the fire grow. Block caught after block. I myself saw
one magnificent store catch at the lower windows. In a few seconds
the flame ran up storey after storey, spouting out at the different
landings as it rose. It reached the roof with a spring, and the
place was gone. There was nothing to stop it. Our people were sure
that it would be another Chicago. The night was fine and frosty,
with a light north-easterly breeze against which the fire was
advancing. We stayed an hour or two. There seemed no danger for Mr.
Peabody's bank. He was evidently, however, extremely harassed and
anxious, as he held the bonds of innumerable merchants whose
property was being destroyed. I thought I was in his way, and left
him, and came home to tell the family what was going on. After I
left the fire travelled faster than ever. Huge rolls of smoke
swelled up fold after fold. The under folds crimson and glowing
yellow from the flames below, sparks flying up like rocket stars. A
petroleum store caught, and the flames ran about in rivers, and
above all the steel blue moon shone through the rents of the rolling
vapour, and the stars with an intensity of brilliant calm such as we
never see in England. It was a night to be eternally remembered."
A great many Irish families were made homeless by this fire, and
Froude subscribed seven hundred dollars for their relief, thereby
encouraging the rumour that he was in the pay of the British
Minister whom he disliked and distrusted most. Froude's final view
of America and Americans was in some respects less favourable than
his first impressions. He was struck by the difference between their
public and private treatment of himself, between their conversation
and the articles in their press. "From what I see of the Eastern
States I do not anticipate any very great things as likely to come
out of the Americans. Their physical frames seem hung together
rather than organically grown .... They are generous with their
money, have much tenderness and quiet good feeling; but the Anglo-
Saxon power is running to seed, and I don't think will revive.
Puritanism is dead, and the collected sternness of temperament which
belonged to it is dead also."
This language seems strange, written as it was only seven years
after the great war. Froude, however, considered that there was much
hysterical passion in the policy of the North, and he shared
Carlyle's dislike of democratic institutions. Moreover, he was
disappointed with the result of his mission. The case seemed so
clear to him that he could not understand why it should seem less
clear to others. He believed that if the priests could have been
driven out of Ireland by William of Orange, the more fanatical
Catholics would have followed them, and Ireland would have become
prosperous, contented, and loyal. To an American Republican such
ideas were as repugnant as they were to an Irish Catholic. An
American could understand the argument that Home Rule was
impracticable, because a Federal Constitution did not apply to the
circumstances of the United Kingdom. He would not readily believe
that the Irish were by nature incapable of self-government, or that
Englishmen must know better what was good for them than they knew
themselves. For Cromwell he could make allowance. The Protector had
to deal with a Catholicism which would have made an end of him and
restored Charles II. But times had changed. Catholics had abandoned
persecution, and ought not to be punished the sins of their fathers.
The Irish did not claim, as the Southern States had claimed, the
right to secede, but to exercise the powers inherent in every State
of the American Union.
Carlyle warmly approved of Froude's undertaking, and persisted in
believing that it had done good by forcing the American public to
see that there were two sides to the historic question, an English
side as well as an Irish one. He was so far right, and with that
qualified success Froude had to be content. His champion, whose
opinion was more to him than any other, than any number of others,
wrote to Mrs. Froude on the 5th of December, 1872: "The rest of the
affair, all that loud whirlwind of Bully Burke, Saturday Review and
Co., both at home and abroad, I take to be, in essence, absolutely
nothing; and to deserve from him no more regard than the barking of
dogs, or the braying of asses. He may depend on it, what he is
saying about Ireland is the genuine truth, or the nearest to it that
has ever been said by any person whatever; and I hope he knows long
ere this (if he likes to consider it) that the truth alone is
anything, and all the circumambient balderdash and whirlwinds of
nonsense tumbling round it are, and eternally remain, nothing. Tell
him I have read his book, and know others that have read it with
attention; and that their and my clear opinion is as above. To
myself there is a ring in it as of clear steel; and my prophecy is
that all the roaring blockheads of the world cannot prevent its
natural effect on human souls. Sooner or later all persons will have
to believe it." Carlyle seldom qualified his approval, and his
earnest advocacy was to Froude a recompense beyond all price.
The first volume of Froude's English in Ireland in the Eighteenth
Century, to which Carlyle refers, had been published at home while
the author was lecturing on the Irish question to the people of the
United States. Like the lectures, on a more thorough and
comprehensive scale, it is a bold indictment of the Irish nation.
Froude could not write without a purpose, nor forget that he was an
Englishman and a Protestant. Before he had finished a single chapter
of his new book he had stated in uncompromising language his opinion
of the Irish race. "Passionate in everything--passionate in their
patriotism, passionate in their religion, passionately courageous,
passionately loyal and affectionate--they are without the manliness
which would give strength and solidity to the sentimental part of
their dispositions; while the surface and show is so seductive and
winning that only experience of its instability can resist its
charm."* Such summary judgments are seldom accurate. Every one must
be acquainted with individual Irishmen who do not correspond with
Froude's general description. Nor does Froude always take into
account the shrewdness, the humour, the genius for politics, which
have distinguished Irishmen throughout the world. Impressed with
this view of the Irish character, he held that forbearance in
dealing with Irish rebellions was misplaced, that Irishmen respected
only an authority with which they durst not trifle, and that
universal confiscation should have followed the defeat of Shan
O'Neill.
--
* Vol. i, pp. 21, 22,
--
These, however, were preliminary matters. When he came to the
eighteenth century Froude had to consider details, and here his
prejudice against Catholicism led him astray. In the reign of George
II. acts of lawless violence were not uncommon on this side of the
Channel, and Richardson's Clarissa was read with a credulity which
showed that abduction could be committed without being followed by
punishment. In parts of Ireland it was not an infrequent offence,
and Froude collected some abominable cases, which he described in
his picturesque way.* As examples of disregard for humanity, and
contempt for law, he was fully justified in citing them. But he
endeavoured to throw responsibility for these outrages on the Roman
Catholic Church. "Young gentlemen," he says, "of the Catholic
persuasion were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the lands
of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of
recovering souls at the same time by carrying off young Protestant
girls of fortune to the mountains, ravishing them with the most
exquisite brutality, and then compelling them to go through a form
of marriage, which a priest was always in attendance ready to
celebrate."+ This is a very serious charge, perhaps as serious a
charge as could well be made against a religious communion. It was
an accusation improbable on the face of it; for while the Church of
Rome in the course of her strange, eventful history has tampered
with the sixth commandment, as Protestants call it, she has never
underrated the virtue of chastity, and has always proclaimed a high
standard of sexual morals. In his zeal to justify the penal laws
against Catholics Froude accepted without sufficient inquiry
evidence which could only have satisfied one willing to believe the
worst.
--
* English in Ireland, vol. i. pp. 417-434.
+ Ibid., p. 417.
--
Several years afterwards, in 1878, the subject was fully discussed,
and Froude's conclusions were shown to be unsound, by another
historian, William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Lecky was a much more
formidable critic than Freeman. Calm in temperament and moderate in
language, he could take part in an historical controversy without
getting into a rage. Freeman, after pages of mere abuse, would
pounce with triumphant ejaculations upon a misprint. Lecky did not
waste his time either on scolding or on trifles. The faults he found
were grave, and his censure was not the less severe for being
decorous. An Anglicised Irishman, living in England, though a
graduate of Dublin University, Lecky became known when he was a very
young man for a brilliant little book on Leaders of Irish Opinion.
He had since published mature and valuable histories of rationalism,
and of morals. His History of England in the Eighteenth Century is
likely to remain a standard book, being written with fairness,
lucidity, and candour. It is true that in his Irish chapters, with
which alone I am concerned, Lecky, like Froude, wrote with a
purpose. He was an Irish patriot, and bent on making out the best
possible case for his own country.
At the same time he was, for an Irishman, singularly impartial
between Catholic and Protestant, leaning, if at all, to the
Protestant side. Yet he repudiated with indignant vehemence Froude's
attempt to connect the Catholic Church with these atrocious crimes.
I am bound to say that I think he disproves the charge of
ecclesiastical complicity. The evidence upon which Froude relied,
the only evidence accessible, is the collection of presentments by
Grand Juries, with the accompanying depositions, in Dublin Castle.
In the first sixty years of the eighteenth century there were
twenty-eight cases of abduction thus recorded. In only four of them
can it be shown that the perpetrator was a Catholic and the victim a
Protestant. In only one, which Froude has described at much length,
did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend mass. For one
of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men
were hanged. "The truth is," says Lecky, "that the crime was merely
the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism."*
These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even
the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic
as ever. Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a
civilised community, does not hint that they had anything to do with
religion, nor were they ever cited in defence of the penal code.
Froude was led astray by religious prejudice, and forgot for once
the historian in the advocate. The penal codes were rather the cause
than the effect of crime and outrage in Ireland. By setting
authority on one side, and popular religion on the other, they made
a breach of the law a pious and meritorious act. The bane of English
rule in Ireland at that time was the treatment of Catholics as
enemies, and the, Charter Schools which Froude praises were employed
for the purpose of alienating children from the faith of their
parents. This mean and paltry persecution strengthened instead of
weakening the Roman Catholic Church.
--
* England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 365.
--
Meanwhile Froude continued his History, and by the beginning of the
year 1874 had brought it down to the Union, with which it concludes.
No more unsparing indictment of a nation has ever been drawn. Except Lord
Clare, and the Orange Lodges, formed after the Battle of the Diamond,
scarcely an Irishman or an Irish institution spared. Grattan's Parliament,
though it did contain a single Catholic, is condemned because it
gave the Catholics votes in 1793. The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, an
Englishman and a Protestant, in 1795, is justified because he was in
favour of emancipation. Flood and Curran are treated with disdain.
Burke, though he was no more a Catholic than Froude himself, is told
that he was not a true Protestant, and did not understand his own
countrymen. Sir Ralph Abercrombie was possessed with an "evil
spirit," because he urged that rebels should not be punished by
soldiers without the sanction of the civil magistrate. His
successor, General Lake, who was responsible for pitch-caps,
receives a gentle, a very gentle, reprimand.
"The United Irishmen had affected the fashion of short hair. The
loyalists called them Croppies, and if a Croppy prisoner stood
silent when it was certain [without a trial] that he could confess
with effect, paper or linen caps smeared with pitch were forced upon
his head to bring him to his senses. Such things ought not to have
been, and such things would not have been had General Lake been
supplied with English troops, but assassins and their accomplices
will not always be delicately handled by those whose lives they have
threatened occasionally. Not a few men suffered who were innocent,
so far as no definite guilt could be proved against them. At such
times, however, those who are not actively loyal lie in the
borderland of just suspicion."* That all Irish Catholics were guilty
unless they could prove themselves to be innocent is a proposition
which cannot be openly maintained, and vitiates history if it be
tacitly assumed. Froude honestly and sincerely believed that the
Irish people were unfit for representative government. He compares the
Irish rebellion of 1798 with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and suggests
that Ireland should have been treated like Oude. Lord Moira, known
afterwards as Lord Hastings, and Governor-General of India, is called
a traitor because he sympathised with the aspirations of his
countrymen. Lord Cornwallis is severely censured for endeavouring to
infuse a spirit of moderation into the Executive after the rebellion
had been put down. What Cornwallis thought of the means by which the
Union was carried is well known. "I long," he said in 1799 "to kick
those whom my public duty obliges me to court. My occupation is to
negociate and job with the most corrupt people under heaven. I despise
and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am
supported only by the reflection that without a Union the British
Empire must be dissolved." That is the real case for the Union, which
could not be better stated than Cornwallis has stated it. Carried by
corrupt means as it was, it might have met with gradual acquiescence
if only it had been accompanied, as Pitt meant to accompany it, by
Catholic emancipation. On this point Froude goes all lengths with
George III., whose hatred of Catholicism was not greater than his own.
In the development of his theory, he was courageous and consistent. He
struck at great names, denouncing "the persevering disloyalty of the
Liberal party, in both Houses of the English Legislature," including
Fox, Sheridan, Tierney, Holland, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk, who
dared to propose a policy of conciliation with Ireland, as Burke had
proposed it with the American colonies. Even Pitt does not come up to
Froude's standard, for Pitt removed Lord Camden, and sent out Lord
Cornwallis.
--
* English in Ireland, iii. 336.
--
It is no disqualification for an historian to hold definite views,
which, if he holds them, it must surely be his duty to express. The
fault of The English in Ireland is to overstate the case, to make it
appear that there was no ground for rebellion in 1798, and no
objection to union in 1800. The whole book is written on the
supposition that the Irish are an inferior race and Catholicism an
inferior religion. So far as religion was concerned, Lecky did not
disagree with Froude. But either because he was an Irishman, or
because he had a judicial mind, he could see the necessity of
understanding what Irish Catholics aimed at before passing judgment
upon them. Froude could never get out of his mind the approval of
treason and assassination to which in the sixteenth century the
Vatican was committed. It may be fascinating polemics to taunt the
Church of Rome with being "always the same." But as a matter of fact
the Church is not the same. It improves with the general march of
the progress that it condemns. Froude fairly and honourably quotes a
crucial instance. Pitt "sought the opinion of the Universities of
France and Spain on the charge generally alleged against Catholics
that their allegiance to their sovereign was subordinate to their
allegiance to the Pope; that they held that heretics might lawfully
be put to death, and that no faith was to be kept with them. The
Universities had unanimously disavowed doctrines which they declared
at once inhuman and unchristian, and on the strength of the
disavowal the British Parliament repealed the Penal Acts of William
for England and Scotland, restored to the Catholics the free use of
their chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy." Toleration
was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and
complete emancipation might have followed but for the interference
of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.
To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund
Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere.
In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules
Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own
death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially
independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters
of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a
word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland
has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a
Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have
been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood
in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it
furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than
anything else in the world. He even denied that there was such a
thing as the Protestant religion. The difference between
Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a
negative no religion could be made. To persecute people for
believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them
for believing too little. Protestant ascendency was social
ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it.
Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablishing the Irish
Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments. He would have been
satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded.
Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an
illustrious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an
almost fanatical enemy of revolution.
Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an
opinion. He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his
conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of
his birth. He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a
firm supporter of her connection with the State. But his wife was a
Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect.
For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was associated, he
felt a passionate hatred of which he has left a monument more
durable than brass in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and
the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He worshipped the British
Constitution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had
been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a
pension from the king. The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with
Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it
did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour. That Burke
should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he
lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circumstance, But it
is a circumstance which entitles him to peculiar attention from the
Irish historian. Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists. Their
hero was his critic, Tom Paine. Yet Froude says that when Burke
"took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain
which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference
became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his
interference after 1789 had no result at all. So far as the French
Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than
ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was
to deter them from Revolutionary methods.
--
* English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215.
--
But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be
trusted. If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the
name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he
would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a
just interpreter of events. Froude looked at the rebellion and the
Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange
manifesto. Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an
unusually eloquent specimen of its class; but they are not history,
any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of
Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what
the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said
that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union.
Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons. He had
been elected in 1790 against the "patriot" Ponsonby, and was opposed
to the Catholic franchise in 1793. He was a man of unblemished
character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk
nonsense. Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked.
Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is
disregarded. "All that was best and noblest in Ireland" was gathered
into the Orange Association, which has been the plague of every
Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of
Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a
Catholic country "a sharp eye should be kept on Papists," and would
doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an
Irishman and a subject. The English in Ireland is reported to have
been Parnell's favourite book. It made him, he said, a Home Ruler
because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government. This
was not Froude's principal object, but the testimony to his
truthfulness is all the more striking on that account. Gladstone,
who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land
Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the "truth and honour"
of the writer.
If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the
Catholic faith is a degrading superstition, and that Ireland is only
saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book
deserves little but praise. Although he did not study for it as he
studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number
of State Papers, with a great mass of official correspondence.
Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as
Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London. But the
scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed
themselves in his mind before he began. He was to vindicate the
Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he
vindicated it. If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards,
Froude assumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of
original sin. He always found in them enough vice to account for any
persecution of which they might be the victims. Just as he could not
write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to
O'Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the
leaders of Irish opinion. They might be Protestants themselves; but
they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough. It was
enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude's historical
reputation is to attack Carlyle's. "I have read," Carlyle wrote on
the 20th of June, 1874, "all your book carefully over again, and
continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than
ever: a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with
advantage; and the want of a copious, carefully weighed concluding
chapter is more sensible to me than ever; but the substance of the
book is genuine truth, and the utterance of it is clear, sharp,
smiting, and decisive, like a shining Damascus sabre; I never
doubted or doubt but its effect will be great and lasting. No
criticism have I seen since you went away that was worth notice.
Poor Lecky is weak as water--bilge-water with a drop of formic acid
in it: unfortunate Lecky, he is wedded to his Irish idols; let him
alone." The reference to Lecky, as unfair as it is amusing, was
provoked by a review of Froude in Macmillan's Magazine. There are
worse idols than Burke, or even Grattan, and Lecky was an Irishman
after all.
A very different critic from Carlyle expressed an equally favourable
opinion.
"I have an interesting letter," Froude wrote to his friend Lady
Derby, formerly Lady Salisbury, "from Bancroft the historian
(American minister at Berlin) on the Irish book. He, I am happy to
say, accepts the view which I wished to impress on the Americans,
and he has sent me some curious correspondence from the French
Foreign Office illustrating and confirming one of my points. One
evening last summer I met Lady Salisbury,* and told her my opinion
of Lord Clare. She dissented with characteristic emphasis--and she
is not a lady who can easily be moved from her judgments. Still, if
she finds time to read the book I should like to hear that she can
recognise the merits as well as the demerits of a statesman who, in
the former at least, so nearly resembled her husband."
--
* The wife of the late Prime Minister.
--
In another letter he says:
"The meaning of the book as a whole is to show to what comes of forcing
uncongenial institutions on a country to which they are unsuited.
If we had governed Ireland as we govern India, there would have been
no confiscation, no persecution of religion, and consequently none
of the reasons for disloyalty. Having chosen to set Parliament and
an Established Church, and to the lands of the old owners, we left
nothing undone to spoil the chances of success with the experiment."
Froude went to the United States with no very exalted opinion of the
Irish; he returned with the lowest possible. "Like all Irish
patriots," including Grattan, Wolfe Tone "would have accepted
greedily any tolerable appointment from the Government which he had
been execrating." The subsequent history of Ireland has scarcely
justified this sweeping invective. "There are persons who believe
that if the king had not interfered with Lord Fitzwilliam, the Irish
Catholics would have accepted gratefully the religious equality
which he was prepared to offer them, and would have remained
thenceforward for all time contented citizens of the British
Empire." So reasonable a theory requires more convincing refutation
than a simple statement that it is "incredible." Incredible, no
doubt, if the Catholics of Ireland were wild beasts, cringing under
the whip, ferocious when released from restraint. Very credible
indeed if Irish Catholics in 1795 were like other people, asking for
justice, and not expecting an impossible ascendency. Interesting as
Froude's narrative is, it becomes, when read together with Lecky's,
more interesting still. Though indignant with Froude's aspersions
upon the Irish race, Lecky did not allow himself to be hurried. He
was writing a history of England as well as of Ireland, and the
Irish chapters had to wait their turn. In Froude's book there are
signs of haste; in Lecky's there are none. Without the brilliancy
and the eloquence which distinguished Froude, Lecky had a power of
marshalling facts that gave to each of them its proper value. No
human being is without prejudice. But Lecky was curiously unlike the
typical Irishman of Froude's imagination. He has written what is by
general acknowledgment the fairest account of the Irish rebellion,
and of the Union to which it led. Of the eight volumes which compose
his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, two, the seventh
and eighth, are devoted exclusively to Ireland.
After the publication of his first two volumes he made no direct
reference to Froude, and contented himself with his own independent
narrative. He vindicated the conduct of Lord Fitzwilliam, and traced
to his recall in 1795 the desperate courses adopted by Irish
Catholics. He showed that Froude had been unjust to the Whigs who
gave evidence for Arthur O'Connor at Maidstone in 1798, and
especially to Grattan. That O'Connor was engaged in treasonable
correspondence with France there can be no doubt now. But he did not
tell his secrets to his Whig friends, and what Grattan said of his
never having heard O'Connor talk about a French invasion was
undoubtedly true.* Froude's hatred of the English Whigs almost
equalled his contempt for the Irish Catholics, and the two feelings
prevented him from writing anything like an narrative either of the
rebellion or of the Union. No other book of his shows such evident
traces of having been written under the influence of Carlyle.
Carlyle's horror of democracy, worship of force, his belief that
martial law was the law of Almighty God, and that cruelty might
always be perpetrated on the right side, are conspicuously displayed.
If Froude spoke of the Roman Catholic Church, he always seemed to
fancy himself back in the sixteenth century, when the murder of
Protestants was regarded at the Vatican as justifiable. The Irish
rebellion of 1798 was led by Protestants, like Lord Edward Fitzgerald,
and free thinkers, like Wolfe Tone. But for the recall of Lord
Fitzwilliam, the Catholics would have taken no part in it, and it
would not have been more dangerous than the rebellion of 1848. Such
at least was Lecky's opinion, supported by weighty arguments, and by
facts which cannot be denied. If Froude's reputation as an historian
depended upon his English in Ireland, it certainly would not stand
high. Of course he had as much right to put the English case as
Father Burke had to put the Irish one. But his responsibility was far
greater, and his splendid talents might have been better employed
than in reviving the mutual animosities of religion or of race.
--
* See Froude's English in Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 320, 321;
Lecky's History of England, vol. viii. p. 52.
--
When Lecky reviewed, with much critical asperity, the last two
volumes of Froude's English in Ireland for Macmillan's Magazine* he
referred to Home Rule as a moderate and constitutional movement. His
own History was not completed till 1890. But when Gladstone
introduced his first Home Rule Bill, in 1886, Lecky opposed it as
strongly as Froude himself. Lecky was quite logical, for the
question whether the Union had been wisely or legitimately carried
had very little to do with the expedience of repealing it. Fieri non
debuit, factum valet, may be common sense as well as good law. But
Froude was not unnaturally triumphant to find his old antagonist in
Irish matters on his side, especially as Freeman was a Home Ruler.
Froude's attitude was never for a moment doubtful. He had always
held that the Irish people were quite unfitted for self-government,
and of all English statesmen Gladstone was the one he trusted least.
He had a theory that great orators were always wrong, even when,
like Pitt and Fox, they were on opposite sides. Gladstone he doubly
repudiated as a High Churchman and a Democrat. Yet, with more
candour than consistency, he always declared that Gladstone was the
English statesman who best understood the Irish Land Question, and
so he plainly told the Liberal Unionists, speaking as one of
themselves. He had praised Henry VIII for confiscating the Irish
estates of absentees, and taunted Pitt with his unreasoning horror
of an absentee tax. He would have given the Irish people almost
everything rather than allow them to do anything for themselves. In
1880 he brought out another edition of his Irish book, with a new
chapter on the crisis. The intervening years had made no difference
in his estimate of Ireland, or of Irishmen. O'Connell, who had
nothing to do with the politics of the eighteenth century, was "not
sincere about repeal," although he "forced the Whigs to give him
whatever he might please to ask for,"+ and he certainly asked for
that.
--
* June, 1874.
+ English in Ireland, 1881, vol. iii. p. 568.
--
That Catholic emancipation was useless and mischievous, Froude never
ceased to declare. He would have dragooned the Irish into
Protestantism and made the three Catholic provinces into a Crown
colony. The Irish establishment he regretted as a badge of
Protestant ascendency. But he was a dangerous ally for Unionists.
That the government of Ireland by what he called a Protestant
Parliament sitting at Westminister, meaning the Parliament of the
United Kingdom, had failed, he not merely admitted, but loudly
proclaimed. It had failed "more signally, and more disgracefully,"
than any other system, because Gladstone admitted that Fenian
outrages precipitated legislative reforms. The alternative was to
rule Ireland, or let her be free, and altogether separate from Great
Britain. Neither branch of the supposed alternative was within the
range of practical politics. But on one point Froude unconsciously
anticipated the immediate future. "The remedy" for the agrarian
troubles of Ireland was, he said, "the establishment of courts to
which the tenant might appeal." The ink of this sentence was
scarcely dry when the Irish Land Bill of 1881 appeared with that
very provision. Froude was always ready and willing to promote the
material benefit of Ireland. Irishmen, except the Protestant
population of Ulster, were children to be treated with firmness and
kindness, the truest kindness being never to let them have their own
way.