Transcribed from “Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays” 1890
Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
FROUDE’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND {219}
THERE appeared a few years since a ‘Comic History of England,’ duly
caricaturing and falsifying all our great national events, and
representing the English people, for many centuries back, as a mob of
fools and knaves, led by the nose in each generation by a few arch-fools
and arch-knaves. Some thoughtful persons regarded the book with utter
contempt and indignation; it seemed to them a crime to have written it; a
proof of ‘banausia,’ as Aristotle would have called it, only to be
outdone by the writing a ‘Comic Bible.’ After a while, however, their
indignation began to subside; their second thoughts, as usual, were more
charitable than their first; they were not surprised to hear that the
author was an honest, just, and able magistrate; they saw that the
publication of such a book involved no moral turpitude; that it was
merely meant as a jest on a subject on which jesting was permissible, and
as a money speculation in a field of which men had a right to make money;
while all which seemed offensive in it was merely the outcome, and as it
were apotheosis, of that method of writing English history which has been
popular for nearly a hundred years. ‘Which of our modern historians,’
they asked themselves, ‘has had any real feeling of the importance, the
sacredness, of his subject?—any real trust in, or respect for, the
characters with whom he dealt? Has not the belief of each and all of
them been the same—that on the whole, the many always have been fools and
knaves; foolish and knavish enough, at least, to become the puppets of a
few fools and knaves who held the reins of power? Have they not held
that, on the whole, the problems of human nature and human history have
been sufficiently solved by Gibbon and Voltaire, Gil Blas and Figaro;
that our forefathers were silly barbarians; that this glorious nineteenth
century is the one region of light, and that all before was outer
darkness, peopled by ‘foreign devils,’ Englishmen, no doubt, according to
the flesh, but in spirit, in knowledge, in creed, in customs, so utterly
different from ourselves that we shall merely show our sentimentalism by
doing aught but laughing at them?
On what other principle have our English histories as yet been
constructed, even down to the children’s books, which taught us in
childhood that the history of this country was nothing but a string of
foolish wars, carried on by wicked kings, for reasons hitherto
unexplained, save on that great historic law of Goldsmith’s by which Sir
Archibald Alison would still explain the French Revolution—
‘The dog, to serve his private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man?’
It will be answered by some, and perhaps rather angrily, that these
strictures are too sweeping; that there is arising, in a certain quarter,
a school of history books for young people of a far more reverent tone,
which tries to do full honour to the Church and her work in the world.
Those books of this school which we have seen, we must reply, seem just
as much wanting in real reverence for the past as the school of Gibbon
and Voltaire. It is not the past which they reverence, but a few
characters or facts eclectically picked out of the past, and, for the
most part, made to look beautiful by ignoring all the features which will
not suit their preconceived pseudo-ideal. There is in these books a
scarcely concealed dissatisfaction with the whole course of the British
mind since the Reformation, and (though they are not inclined to confess
the fact) with its whole course before the Reformation, because that
course was one of steady struggle against the Papacy and its
anti-national pretensions. They are the outcome of an utterly un-English
tone of thought; and the so-called ‘ages of faith’ are pleasant and
useful to them, principally because they are distant and unknown enough
to enable them to conceal from their readers that in the ages on which
they look back as ideally perfect a Bernard and a Francis of Assisi were
crying all day long—‘O that my head were a fountain of tears, that I
might weep for the sins of my people!’ Dante was cursing popes and
prelates in the name of the God of Righteousness; Boccaccio and Chaucer
were lifting the veil from priestly abominations of which we now are
ashamed even to read; and Wolsey, seeing the rottenness of the whole
system, spent his mighty talents, and at last poured out his soul unto
death, in one long useless effort to make the crooked straight, and
number that which had been weighed in the balances of God, and found for
ever wanting. To ignore wilfully facts like these, which were patent all
along to the British nation, facts on which the British laity acted, till
they finally conquered at the Reformation, and on which they are acting
still, and will, probably, act for ever, is not to have any real
reverence for the opinions or virtues of our forefathers; and we are not
astonished to find repeated, in such books, the old stock calumnies
against our lay and Protestant worthies, taken at second-hand from the
pages of Lingard. In copying from Lingard, however, this party has done
no more than those writers have who would repudiate any party—almost any
Christian—purpose. Lingard is known to have been a learned man, and to
have examined many manuscripts which few else had taken the trouble to
look at; so his word is to be taken, no one thinking it worth while to
ask whether he has either honestly read or honestly quoted the documents.
It suited the sentimental and lazy liberality of the last generation to
make a show of fairness by letting the Popish historian tell his side of
the story, and to sneer at the illiberal old notion that gentlemen of his
class were given to be rather careless about historic truth when they had
a purpose to serve thereby; and Lingard is now actually recommended as a
standard authority for the young by educated Protestants, who seem
utterly unable to see that, whether the man be honest or not, his whole
view of the course of British events since Becket first quarrelled with
his king must be antipodal to their own; and that his account of all
which has passed for three hundred years since the fall of Wolsey is most
likely to be (and, indeed, may be proved to be) one huge libel on the
whole nation, and the destiny which God has marked out for it.
There is, indeed, no intrinsic cause why the ecclesiastical, or
pseudo-Catholic, view of history should, in any wise, conduce to a just
appreciation of our forefathers. For not only did our forefathers rebel
against that conception again and again, till they finally trampled it
under their feet, and so appear, _primâ facie_, as offenders to be judged
at its bar; but the conception itself is one which takes the very same
view of nature as that cynic conception of which we spoke above. Man,
with the Romish divines, is, _ipso facto_, the same being as the man of
Voltaire, Le Sage, or Beaumarchais; he is an insane and degraded being,
who is to be kept in order, and, as far as may be, cured and set to work
by an ecclesiastical system; and the only threads of light in the dark
web of his history are clerical and theurgic, not lay and human.
Voltaire is the very _experimentum crucis_ of this ugly fact. European
history looks to him what it would have looked to his Jesuit preceptors,
had the sacerdotal element in it been wanting; what heathen history
actually did look to them. He eliminates the sacerdotal element, and
nothing remains but the chaos of apes and wolves which the Jesuits had
taught him to believe was the original substratum of society. The
humanity of his history—even of his ‘Pucelle d’Orléans’,—is simply the
humanity of Sanchez and the rest of those _vingtquatre Pères_ who hang
gibbeted for ever in the pages of Pascal. He is superior to his
teachers, certainly, in this, that he has hope for humanity on earth;
dreams of a new and nobler life for society, by means of a true and
scientific knowledge of the laws of the moral and material universe; in a
word, he has, in the midst of all his filth and his atheism, a faith in a
righteous and truth-revealing God, which the priests who brought him up
had not. Let the truth be spoken, even though in favour of such a
destroying Azrael as Voltaire. And what if his primary conception of
humanity be utterly base? Is that of our modern historians so much
higher? Do Christian men seem to them, on the whole, in all ages, to
have had the spirit of God with them, leading them into truth, however
imperfectly and confusedly they may have learnt his lessons? Have they
ever heard with their ears, or listened when their fathers have declared
unto them, the noble works which God did in their days, and in the old
time before them? Do they believe that the path of Christendom has been,
on the whole, the path of life and the right way, and that the living God
is leading her therein? Are they proud of the old British worthies? Are
they jealous and tender of the reputation of their ancestors? Do they
believe that there were any worthies at all in England before the
steam-engine and political economy were discovered? Do their conceptions
of past society and the past generations retain anything of that great
thought which is common to all the Aryan races—that is, to all races who
have left aught behind them better than mere mounds of earth—to Hindoo
and Persian, Greek and Roman, Teuton and Scandinavian, that men are the
sons of the heroes, who were the sons of God? Or do they believe that
for civilised people of the nineteenth century it is as well to say as
little as possible about ancestors who possessed our vices without our
amenities, our ignorance without our science; who were bred, no matter
how, like flies by summer heat, out of that everlasting midden which men
call the world, to buzz and sting their foolish day, and leave behind
them a fresh race which knows them not, and could win no honour by owning
them, and which owes them no more than if it had been produced, as
midden-flies were said to be of old, by some spontaneous generation?
It is not probable that this writer will be likely to undervalue
political economy, or the steam-engine, or any other solid and practical
good which God has unveiled to this generation. All that he does demand
(for he has a right to demand it) is that rational men should believe
that our forefathers were at least as good as we are; that whatsoever
their measure of light was, they acted up to what they knew as faithfully
as we do; and that, on the whole, it was not their fault if they did not
know more. Even now the real discoveries of the age are made, as of old,
by a very few men; and, when made, have to struggle, as of old, against
all manner of superstitions, lazinesses, scepticisms. Is the history of
the Minié rifle one so very complimentary to our age’s quickness of
perception that we can afford to throw many stones at the prejudices of
our ancestors? The truth is that, as of old, ‘many men talk of Robin
Hood who never shot in his bow’; and many talk of Bacon who never
discovered a law by induction since they were born. As far as our
experience goes, those who are loudest in their jubilations over the
wonderful progress of the age are those who have never helped that
progress forward one inch, but find it a great deal easier and more
profitable to use the results which humbler men have painfully worked out
as second-hand capital for hustings-speeches and railway books, and
flatter a mechanics’ institute of self-satisfied youths by telling them
that the least instructed of them is wiser than Erigena or Roger Bacon.
Let them be. They have their reward. And so also has the patient and
humble man of science, who, the more he knows, confesses the more how
little he knows, and looks back with affectionate reverence on the great
men of old time—on Archimedes and Ptolemy, Aristotle and Pliny, and many
another honourable man who, walking in great darkness, sought a ray of
light, and did not seek in vain,—as integral parts of that golden chain
of which he is but one link more; as scientific forefathers, without
whose aid his science could not have had a being.
Meanwhile, this general tone of irreverence for our forefathers is no
hopeful sign. It is unwise to ‘inquire why the former times were better
than these’; to hang lazily and weakly over some eclectic dream of a past
golden age; for to do so is to deny that God is working in this age, as
well as in past ages; that His light is as near us now as it was to the
worthies of old time.
But it is more than unwise to boast and rejoice that the former times
were worse than these; and to teach young people to say in their hearts,
‘What clever fellows we are, compared with our stupid old fogies of
fathers!’ More than unwise; for possibly it may be false in fact. To
look at the political and moral state of Europe at this moment,
Christendom can hardly afford to look down on any preceding century, and
seems to be in want of something which neither science nor constitutional
government seems able to supply. Whether our forefathers also lacked
that something we will not inquire just now; but if they did, their want
of scientific and political knowledge was evidently not the cause of the
defect; or why is not Spain now infinitely better, instead of being
infinitely worse off, than she was three hundred years ago?
At home, too—But on the question whether we are so very much better off
than our forefathers Mr. Froude, not we, must speak: for he has
deliberately, in his new history, set himself to the solution of this
question, and we will not anticipate what he has to say; what we would
rather insist on now are the moral effects produced on our young people
by books which teach them to look with contempt on all generations but
their own, and with suspicion on all public characters save a few
contemporaries of their own especial party.
There is an ancient Hebrew book, which contains a singular story
concerning a grandson who was cursed because his father laughed at the
frailty of the grandfather. Whether the reader shall regard that story
(as we do) as a literal fact recorded by inspired wisdom, as an instance
of one of the great root-laws of family life, and therefore of that
national life which (as the Hebrew book so cunningly shows) is the
organic development of the family life; or whether he shall treat it (as
we do not) as a mere apologue or myth, he must confess that it is equally
grand in its simplicity and singular in its unexpected result. The words
of the story, taken literally and simply, no more justify the notion that
Canaan’s slavery was any magical consequence of the old patriarch’s anger
than they do the well-known theory that it was the cause of the Negro’s
blackness. Ham shows a low, foul, irreverent, unnatural temper towards
his father. The old man’s shame is not a cause of shame to his son, but
only of laughter. Noah prophesies (in the fullest and deepest meaning of
that word) that a curse will come upon that son’s son; that he will be a
slave of slaves; and reason and experience show that he spoke truth. Let
the young but see that their fathers have no reverence for the generation
before them, then will they in turn have no reverence for their fathers.
Let them be taught that the sins of their ancestors involve their own
honour so little that they need not take any trouble to clear the blot
off the scutcheon, but may safely sit down and laugh over it, saying,
‘Very likely it is true. If so, it is very amusing; and if not—what
matter?’—Then those young people are being bred up in a habit of mind
which contains in itself all the capabilities of degradation and slavery,
in self-conceit, hasty assertion, disbelief in nobleness, and all the
other ‘credulities of scepticism’: parted from that past from which they
take their common origin, they are parted also from each other, and
become selfish, self-seeking, divided, and therefore weak: disbelieving
in the nobleness of those who have gone before them, they learn more and
more to disbelieve in the nobleness of those around them; and, by denying
God’s works of old, come, by a just and dreadful Nemesis, to be unable to
see his works in the men of their own day; to suspect and impugn valour,
righteousness, disinterestedness in their contemporaries; to attribute
low motives; to pride themselves on looking at men and things as ‘men who
know the world,’ so the young puppies style it; to be less and less
chivalrous to women, less and less respectful to old men, less and less
ashamed of boasting about their sensual appetites; in a word, to show all
those symptoms which, when fully developed, leave a generation without
fixed principles, without strong faith, without self-restraint, without
moral cohesion, the sensual and divided prey of any race, however
inferior in scientific knowledge, which has a clear and fixed notion of
its work and destiny. That many of these signs are themselves more and
more ominously showing in our young men, from the fine gentleman who
rides in Rotten Row to the boy-mechanic who listens enraptured to Mr.
Holyoake’s exposures of the absurdity of all human things save Mr.
Holyoake’s self, is a fact which presses itself most on those who have
watched this age most carefully, and who (rightly or wrongly) attribute
much of this miserable temper to the way in which history has been
written among us for the last hundred years.
Whether or not Mr. Froude would agree with these notions, he is more or
less responsible for them; for they have been suggested by his ‘History
of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth.’ It was
impossible to read the book without feeling the contrast between its tone
and that of every other account of the times which one had ever seen.
Mr. Froude seems to have set to work upon the principle, too much ignored
in judging of the past, that the historian’s success must depend on his
dramatic faculty; and not merely on that constructive element of the
faculty in which Mr. Macaulay shows such astonishing power, but on that
higher and deeper critical element which ought to precede the
constructive process, and without which the constructive element will
merely enable a writer, as was once bitterly but truly said, ‘to produce
the greatest possible misrepresentation with the least possible
distortion of fact.’ That deeper dramatic faculty, the critical, is not
logical merely, but moral, and depends on the moral health, the wideness
and heartiness of his moral sympathies, by which he can put himself—as
Mr. Froude has attempted to do, and as we think successfully—into the
place of each and every character, and not merely feel for them, but feel
with them. He does not merely describe their actions from the outside,
attributing them arbitrarily to motives which are pretty sure to be the
lowest possible, because it is easier to conceive a low motive than a
lofty one, and to call a man a villain than to unravel patiently the
tangled web of good and evil of which his thoughts are composed. He has
attempted to conceive of his characters as he would if they had been his
own contemporaries and equals, acting, speaking in his company; and he
has therefore thought himself bound to act toward them by those rules of
charity and courtesy, common alike to Christian morals, English law, and
decent society; namely, to hold every man innocent till he is proved
guilty; where a doubt exists, to give the prisoner at the bar the benefit
of it; not to excite the minds of the public against him by those
insinuative or vituperative epithets, which are but adders and scorpions;
and, on the whole, to believe that a man’s death and burial is not the
least reason for ceasing to behave to him like a gentleman and a
Christian. We are not inclined to play with solemn things, or to copy
Lucian and Quevedo in writing dialogues of the dead; but what dialogues
might some bold pen dash off between the old sons of Anak, at whose
coming Hades has long ago been moved, and to receive whom all the kings
of the nation have risen up, and the little scribblers who have fancied
themselves able to fathom and describe characters to whom they were but
pigmies! Conceive a half-hour’s interview between Queen Elizabeth and
some popular lady-scribbler, who has been deluding herself into the fancy
that gossiping inventories of millinery are history . . . ‘You pretend to
judge me, whose labours, whose cares, whose fiery trials were, beside
yours, as the heaving volcano beside a boy’s firework? You condemn my
weaknesses? Know that they were stronger than your strength! You impute
motives for my sins? Know that till you are as great as I have been, for
evil and for good, you will be as little able to comprehend my sins as my
righteousness! Poor marsh-croaker, who wishest not merely to swell up to
the bulk of the ox, but to embrace it in thy little paws, know thine own
size, and leave me to be judged by Him who made me!’ . . . How the poor
soul would shrink back into nothing before that lion eye which saw and
guided the destinies of the world, and all the flunkey-nature (if such a
vice exist beyond the grave) come out in utter abjectness, as if the ass
in the fable, on making his kick at the dead lion, had discovered to his
horror that the lion was alive and well—Spirit of Quevedo! finish for us
the picture which we cannot finish for ourselves.
In a very different spirit from such has Mr. Froude approached these
times. Great and good deeds were done in them; and it has therefore
seemed probable to him that there were great and good men there to do
them. Thoroughly awake to the fact that the Reformation was the new
birth of the British nation, it has seemed to him a puzzling theory which
attributes its success to the lust of a tyrant and the cupidity of his
courtiers. It has evidently seemed to him paradoxical that a king who
was reputed to have been a satyr, instead of keeping as many concubines
as seemed good to him, should have chosen to gratify his passions by
entering six times into the strict bonds of matrimony, religiously
observing those bonds. It has seemed to him even more paradoxical that
one reputed to have been the most sanguinary tyrant who ever disgraced
the English throne should have been not only endured, but loved and
regretted by a fierce and free-spoken people; and he, we suppose, could
comprehend as little as we can the reasoning of such a passage as the
following, especially when it proceeds from the pen of so wise and
venerable a writer as Mr. Hallam.
‘A government administered with so frequent violations, not only of the
chartered privileges of Englishmen, but of those still more sacred rights
which natural law has established, must have been regarded, one would
imagine, with just abhorrence and earnest longings for a change. Yet
contemporary authorities by no means answer this expectation. Some
mention Henry after his death in language of eulogy;’ (not only
Elizabeth, be it remembered, but Cromwell also, always spoke of him with
deepest respect; and their language always found an echo in the English
heart;) ‘and if we except those whom attachment to the ancient religion
had inspired with hatred to his memory, few seem to have been aware that
his name would descend to posterity among those of the many tyrants and
oppressors of innocence whom the wrath of Heaven has raised up, and the
servility of man endured.’
The names of even those few we should be glad to have; for it seems to us
that, with the exception of a few ultra-Protestants, who could not
forgive that persecution of the Reformers which he certainly permitted,
if not encouraged, during one period of his reign, no one adopted the
modern view of his character till more than a hundred years after his
death, when belief in all nobleness and faith had died out among an
ignoble and faithless generation, and the scandalous gossip of such a
light rogue as Osborne was taken into the place of honest and respectful
history.
To clear up such seeming paradoxes as these by carefully examining the
facts of the sixteenth century has been Mr. Froude’s work; and we have
the results of his labour in two volumes, embracing only a period of
eleven years; but giving promise that the mysteries of the succeeding
time will be well cleared up for us in future volumes, and that we shall
find our forefathers to have been, if no better, at least no worse men
than ourselves. He has brought to the task known talents and learning, a
mastery over English prose almost unequalled in this generation, a spirit
of most patient and good-tempered research, and that intimate knowledge
of human motives and passions which his former books have shown, and
which we have a right to expect from any scholar who has really profited
by Aristotle’s unrivalled Ethics. He has fairly examined every
contemporary document within his reach, and, as he informs us in the
preface, he has been enabled, through the kindness of Sir Francis
Palgrave, to consult a great number of MSS. relating to the Reformation,
hitherto all but unknown to the public, and referred to in his work as
MSS. in the Rolls’ House, where the originals are easily accessible.
These, he states, he intends to publish, with additions from his own
reading, as soon as he has brought his history down to the end of Henry
the Eighth’s reign.
But Mr. Froude’s chief text-book seems to have been State Papers and Acts
of Parliament. He has begun his work in the only temper in which a man
can write accurately and well; in a temper of trust toward the generation
whom he describes. The only temper; for if a man has no affection for
the characters of whom he reads, he will never understand them; if he has
no respect for his subject, he will never take the trouble to exhaust it.
To such an author the Statutes at large, as the deliberate expression of
the nation’s will and conscience, will appear the most important of all
sources of information; the first to be consulted, the last to be
contradicted; the Canon which is not to be checked and corrected by
private letters and flying pamphlets, but which is to check and correct
them. This seems Mr. Froude’s theory; and we are at no pains to confess
that if he be wrong we see no hope of arriving at truth. If these public
documents are not to be admitted in evidence before all others, we see no
hope for the faithful and earnest historian; he must give himself up to
swim as he may on the frothy stream of private letters, anecdotes, and
pamphlets, the puppet of the ignorance, credulity, peevishness, spite, of
any and every gossip and scribbler.
Beginning his history with the fall of Wolsey, Mr. Froude enters, of
course, at his first step into the vexed question of Henry’s divorce: an
introductory chapter, on the general state of England, we shall notice
hereafter.
A very short inspection of the method in which he handles the divorce
question gives us at once confidence in his temper and judgment, and hope
that we may at last come to some clearer understanding of it than the old
law gives us, which we have already quoted, concerning the dog who went
mad to serve his private ends. In a few masterly pages he sketches for
us the rotting and dying Church, which had recovered her power after the
Wars of the Roses over an exhausted nation; but in form only, not in
life. Wolsey, with whom he has fair and understanding sympathy, he
sketches as the transition minister, ‘loving England well, but loving
Rome better,’ who intends a reform of the Church, but who, as the Pope’s
commissioner for that very purpose, is liable to a _præmunire_, and
therefore dare not appeal to Parliament to carry out his designs, even if
he could have counted on the Parliament’s assistance in any measures
designed to invigorate the Church. At last arises in the divorce
question the accident which brings to an issue on its most vital point
the question of Papal power in England, and which finally draws down ruin
upon Wolsey himself.
This appears to have begun in the winter of 1526–27. It was proposed to
marry the Princess Mary to a son of the French king. The Bishop of
Tarbés, who conducted the negotiations, advised himself, apparently by
special instigation of the evil spirit, to raise a question as to her
legitimacy.
No more ingenious plan for convulsing England could have been devised.
The marriage from which Mary sprang only stood on a reluctant and
doubtful dispensation of the Pope’s. Henry had entered into it at the
entreaty of his ministers, contrary to a solemn promise given to his
father, and in spite of the remonstrances of the Archbishop of
Canterbury. No blessing seemed to have rested on it. All his children
had died young, save this one sickly girl: a sure note of divine
displeasure in the eyes of that coarse-minded Church which has always
declared the chief, if not the only, purpose of marriage to be the
procreation of children.
But more: to question Mary’s legitimacy was to throw open the question of
succession to half a dozen ambitious competitors. It was, too probably,
to involve England at Henry’s death in another civil war of the Roses,
and in all the internecine horrors which were still rankling in the
memories of men; and probably, also, to bring down a French or Scotch
invasion. There was then too good reason, as Mr. Froude shows at length,
for Wolsey’s assertion to John Cassalis—‘If his Holiness, which God
forbid, shall show himself unwilling to listen to the King’s demands, to
me assuredly it will be but grief to live longer, for the innumerable
evils which I foresee will follow . . . Nothing before us but universal
and inevitable ruin.’ Too good reason there was for the confession of
the Pope himself to Gardner, ‘What danger it was to the realm to have
this thing hang in suspense . . . That without an heir-male, etc., the
realm was like to come to dissolution.’ Too good reason for the bold
assertion of the Cardinal-Governor of Bologna, that ‘he knew the guise of
England as few men did, and that if the King should die without
heirs-male, he was sure that it would cost two hundred thousand men’s
lives; and that to avoid this mischief by a second marriage, he thought,
would deserve heaven.’ Too good reason for the assertion of Hall, that
‘all indifferent and discreet persons judged it necessary for the Pope to
grant Henry a divorce, and, by enabling him to marry again, give him the
hope of an undisputed heir-male.’ The Pope had full power to do this; in
fact, such cases had been for centuries integral parts of his
jurisdiction as head of Christendom. But he was at once too timid and
too time-serving to exercise his acknowledged authority; and thus, just
at the very moment when his spiritual power was being tried in the
balance, he chose himself to expose his political power to the same test.
Both were equally found wanting. He had, it appeared, as little heart to
do justice among kings and princes as he had to seek and to save the
souls of men; and the Reformation followed as a matter of course.
Through the tangled brakes of this divorce question Mr. Froude leads us
with ease and grace, throwing light, and even beauty, into dark nooks
where before all was mist, not merely by his intimate acquaintance with
the facts, but still more by his deep knowledge of human character, and
of woman’s even more than of man’s. For the first time the actors in
this long tragedy appear to us as no mere bodiless and soulless names,
but as beings of like passions with ourselves, comprehensible, coherent,
organic, even in their inconsistencies. Catherine of Arragon is still
the Catherine of Shakspeare; but Mr. Froude has given us the key to many
parts of her story which Shakspeare left unexplained, and delicately
enough has made us understand how Henry’s affections, if he ever had any
for her—faithfully as he had kept (with one exception) to that loveless
_mariage de convenance_—may have been gradually replaced by indifference
and even dislike, long before the divorce was forced on him as a question
not only of duty to the nation, but of duty to Heaven. And that he did
see it in this latter light, Mr. Froude brings proof from his own words,
from which we can escape only by believing that the confessedly honest
‘Bluff King Hal’ had suddenly become a consummate liar and a canting
hypocrite.
Delicately, too, as if speaking of a lady whom he had met in modern
society (as a gentleman is bound to do), does Mr. Froude touch on the
sins of that hapless woman, who played for Henry’s crown, and paid for it
with her life. With all mercy and courtesy he gives us proof (for he
thinks it his duty to do so) of the French mis-education, the petty
cunning, the tendency to sensuality, the wilful indelicacy of her
position in Henry’s household as the rival of his queen, which made her
last catastrophe at least possible. Of the justice of her sentence he
has no doubt, any more than of her pre-engagement to some one, as proved
by a letter existing among Cromwell’s papers. Poor thing! If she did
that which was laid to her charge, and more, she did nothing, after all,
but what she had been in the habit of seeing the queens and princesses of
the French court do notoriously, and laugh over shamelessly; while, as
Mr. Froude well says, ‘If we are to hold her entirely free from guilt, we
place not only the King, but the Privy Council, the Judges, the Lords and
Commons, and the two Houses of Convocation, in a position fatal to their
honour and degrading to ordinary humanity’ (Mr. Froude should have added
Anne Boleyn’s own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and her father, who were on
the commission appointed to try her lovers, and her cousin, Anthony St.
Leger, a man of the very highest character and ability, who was on the
jury which found a true bill against her). ‘We can not,’ continues Mr.
Froude, ‘acquiesce without inquiry in so painful a conclusion. The
English nation also, as well as she, deserves justice at our hands; and
it cannot be thought uncharitable if we look with some scrutiny at the
career of a person who, but for the catastrophe with which it closed,
would not have so readily obtained forgiveness for having admitted the
addresses of the King, or for having received the homage of the court as
its future sovereign, while the King’s wife, her mistress, as yet resided
under the same roof.’ Mr. Froude’s conclusion is, after examining the
facts, the same with the whole nation of England in Henry’s reign: but no
one can accuse him of want of sympathy with the unhappy woman, who reads
the eloquent and affecting account of her trial and death, which ends his
second volume. Our only fear is, that by having thus told the truth he
has, instead of justifying our ancestors, only added one more to the list
of people who are to be ‘given up’ with a cynical shrug and smile. We
have heard already, and among young ladies too, who can be as cynical as
other people in these times, such speeches as, ‘Well, I suppose he has
proved Anne Boleyn to be a bad creature; but that does not make that
horrid Henry any more right in cutting off her head.’ Thus two people
will be despised where only one was before, and the fact still ignored,
that it is just as senseless to say that Henry cut off Anne Boleyn’s head
as that Queen Victoria hanged Palmer. Death, and death of a far more
horrible kind than that which Anne Boleyn suffered, was the established
penalty of the offences of which she was convicted: and which had in her
case this fearful aggravation, that they were offences not against Henry
merely, but against the whole English nation. She had been married in
order that there might be an undisputed heir to the throne, and a fearful
war avoided. To throw into dispute, by any conduct of hers, the
legitimacy of her own offspring, argued a levity or a hard-heartedness
which of itself deserved the severest punishment.
We will pass from this disagreeable topic to Mr. Froude’s lifelike sketch
of Pope Clement, and the endless tracasseries into which his mingled
weakness and cunning led him, and which, like most crooked dealings,
ended by defeating their own object. Pages 125 _et sqq._ of Vol. I.
contain sketches of him, his thoughts and ways, as amusing as they are
historically important; but we have no space to quote from them. It will
be well for those to whom the Reformation is still a matter of
astonishment to read those pages, and consider what manner of man he was,
in spite of all pretended divine authority, under whose rule the Romish
system received its irrecoverable wound.
But of all these figures, not excepting Henry’s own, Wolsey stands out as
the most grand and tragical; and Mr. Froude has done good service to
history, if only in making us understand at last the wondrous ‘butcher’s
son.’ Shakspeare seems to have felt (though he could explain the reason
neither to his auditors nor, perhaps, to himself) that Wolsey was, on the
whole, an heroical man. Mr. Froude shows at once his strength and his
weakness; his deep sense of the rottenness of the Church; his purpose to
purge her from those abominations which were as well known, it seems, to
him as they were afterwards to the whole people of England; his vast
schemes for education; his still vaster schemes for breaking the alliance
with Spain, and uniting France and England as fellow-servants of the
Pope, and twin-pillars of the sacred fabric of the Church, which helped
so much toward his interest in Catherine’s divorce, as a ‘means’ (these
are his own words) ‘to bind my most excellent sovereign and this glorious
realm to the holy Roman See in faith and obedience for ever’; his hopes
of deposing the Emperor, putting down the German heresies, and driving
back the Turks beyond the pale of Christendom; his pathetic confession to
the Bishop of Bayonne that ‘if he could only see the divorce arranged,
the King re-married, the succession settled, and the laws and the Church
reformed, he would retire from the world, and would serve God the
remainder of his days.’
Peace be with him! He was surely a noble soul; misled, it may be—as who
is not when his turn comes?—by the pride of conscious power; and ‘though
he loved England well, yet loving Rome better’: but still it is a comfort
to see, either in past or in present, one more brother whom we need not
despise, even though he may have wasted his energies on a dream.
And on a dream he did waste them, in spite of all his cunning. As Mr.
Froude, in a noble passage, says:—
‘Extravagant as his hopes seem, the prospect of realising them was,
humanly speaking, neither chimerical nor even improbable. He had but
made the common mistake of men of the world, who are the
representatives of an old order of things, when that order is doomed
and dying. He could not read the signs of the times; and confounding
the barrenness of death with the barrenness of winter, which might be
followed by a new spring and summer, he believed that the old
life-tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground,
might bloom again in its old beauty. The thing which he called
heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of
princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could
trample out; and as, in the early years of Christianity, the meanest
slave who was thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the
forbidden mysteries of the Gospel saw deeper, in the divine power of
his faith, into the future even of this earthly world, than the
sagest of his imperial persecutors,—so a truer political prophet than
Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those poor men
for whom his police were searching in the purlieus of London, who
were risking death and torture in disseminating the pernicious
volumes of the English Testament.’
It will be seen from this magnificent passage that Mr. Froude is
distinctly a Protestant. He is one, to judge from his book; and all the
better one, because he can sympathise with whatsoever nobleness, even
with whatsoever mere conservatism, existed in the Catholic party. And
therefore, because he has sympathies which are not merely party ones, but
human ones, he has given the world, in these two volumes, a history of
the early Reformation altogether unequalled. This human sympathy, while
it has enabled him to embalm in most affecting prose the sad story of the
noble though mistaken Carthusians, and to make even the Nun of Kent
interesting, because truly womanly, in her very folly and deceit, has
enabled him likewise to show us the hearts of the early martyrs as they
never have been shown before. His sketch of the Christian Brothers, and
his little true romance of Anthony Dalaber, the Oxford student, are gems
of writing; while his conception of Latimer, on whom he looks as the hero
of the movement, and all but an English Luther, is as worthy of Latimer
as it is of himself. It is written as history should be,
discriminatingly, patiently, and yet lovingly and genially; rejoicing not
in evil, but in the truth; and rejoicing still more in goodness, where
goodness can honestly be found.
To the ecclesiastical and political elements in the English Reformation
Mr. Froude devotes a large portion of his book. We shall not enter into
the questions which he discusses therein. That aspect of the movement is
a foreign and a delicate subject, from discussing which a Scotch
periodical may be excused. {246} North Britain had a somewhat different
problem to solve from her southern sister, and solved it in an altogether
different way: but this we must say, that the facts and, still more, the
State Papers (especially the petition of the Commons, as contrasted with
the utterly benighted answer of the Bishops) which Mr. Froude gives are
such as to raise our opinion of the method on which the English part of
the Reformation was conducted, and make us believe that in this, as in
other matters, both Henry and his Parliament, though still doctrinal
Romanists, were sound-headed practical Englishmen.
This result is of the same kind as most of those at which Mr. Froude
arrives. They form altogether a general justification of our ancestors
in Henry the Eighth’s time, if not of Henry the Eighth himself, which
frees Mr. Froude from that charge of irreverence to the past generations
against which we protested in the beginning of the article. We hope
honestly that he may be as successful in his next volumes as he has been
in these, in vindicating the worthies of the sixteenth century. Whether
he shall fail or not, and whether or not he has altogether succeeded, in
the volumes before us, his book marks a new epoch, and, we trust, a
healthier and loftier one, in English history. We trust that they
inaugurate a time in which the deeds of our forefathers shall be looked
on as sacred heirlooms; their sins as our shame, their victories as
bequests to us; when men shall have sufficient confidence in those to
whom they owe their existence to scrutinise faithfully and patiently
every fact concerning them, with a proud trust that, search as they may,
they will not find much of which to be ashamed.
Lastly, Mr. Froude takes a view of Henry’s character, not, indeed, new
(for it is the original one), but obsolete for now two hundred years.
Let it be well understood that he makes no attempt (he has been accused
thereof) to whitewash Henry: all that he does is to remove as far as he
can the modern layers of ‘black-wash,’ and to let the man himself, fair
or foul, be seen. For the result he is not responsible: it depends on
facts; and unless Mr. Froude has knowingly concealed facts to an amount
of which even a Lingard might be ashamed, the result is that Henry the
Eighth was actually very much the man which he appeared to be to the
English nation in his own generation, and for two or three generations
after his death—a result which need not astonish us, if we will only give
our ancestors credit for having at least as much common sense as
ourselves, and believe (why should we not?) that, on the whole, they
understood their own business better than we are likely to do.
‘The bloated tyrant,’ it is confessed, contrived somehow or other to be
popular enough. Mr. Froude tells us the reasons. He was not born a
bloated tyrant, any more than Queen Elizabeth (though the fact is not
generally known) was born a wizened old woman. He was from youth, till
he was long past his grand climacteric, a very handsome, powerful, and
active man, temperate in his habits, good-humoured, frank and honest in
his speech (as even his enemies are forced to confess). He seems to have
been (as his portraits prove sufficiently), for good and for evil, a
thorough John Bull; a thorough Englishman: but one of the very highest
type.
‘Had he died (says Mr. Froude) previous to the first agitation of the
divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the heaviest
misfortunes which had ever befallen this country, and he would have
left a name which would have taken its place in history by the side
of the Black Prince or the Conqueror of Agincourt. Left at the most
trying age, with his character unformed, with the means of gratifying
every inclination, and married by his ministers, when a boy, to an
unattractive woman far his senior, he had lived for thirty-six years
almost without blame, and bore through England the reputation of an
upright and virtuous king. Nature had been prodigal to him of her
rarest gifts . . . Of his intellectual ability we are not left to
judge from the suspicious panegyrics of his contemporaries. His
State Papers and letters may be placed by the side of those of Wolsey
or of Cromwell, and they lose nothing by the comparison. Though they
are broadly different, the perception is equally clear, the
expression equally powerful; and they breathe throughout an
irresistible vigour of purpose. In addition to this, he had a fine
musical taste, carefully cultivated; he spoke and wrote in four
languages; and his knowledge of a multitude of subjects, with which
his versatile ability made him conversant, would have formed the
reputation of any ordinary man. He was among the best physicians of
his age. He was his own engineer, inventing improvements in
artillery and new constructions in shipbuilding; and this not with
the condescending incapacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough
workmanlike understanding. His reading was vast, especially in
theology. He was ‘attentive,’ as it is called, ‘to his religious
duties,’ being present at the services in chapel two or three times a
day with unfailing regularity, and showing, to outward appearance, a
real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his
life. In private he was good-humoured and good-natured. His letters
to his secretaries, though never undignified, are simple, easy, and
unrestrained, and the letters written by them to him are similarly
plain and business-like, as if the writers knew that the person whom
they were addressing disliked compliments, and chose to be treated as
a man. He seems to have been always kind, always considerate;
inquiring into their private concerns with genuine interest, and
winning, as a consequence, their sincere and unaffected attachment.
As a ruler he had been eminently popular. All his wars had been
successful. He had the splendid tastes in which the English people
most delighted; . . . he had more than once been tried with
insurrection, which he had soothed down without bloodshed, and
extinguished in forgiveness . . . And it is certain that if he had
died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VIII., like the Roman
emperor said by Tacitus to have been _censensu omnium dignus imperii
nisi imperasset_, would have been considered by posterity as formed
by Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would
have been deplored as a perpetual calamity.’
Mr. Froude has, of course, not written these words without having facts
whereby to prove them. One he gives in an important note containing an
extract from a letter of the Venetian Ambassador in 1515. At least, if
his conclusions be correct, we must think twice ere we deny his assertion
that ‘the man best able of all living Englishmen to govern England had
been set to do it by the conditions of his birth.’