The Life of Froude Part 2

The origin of Froude's style is not obscure. Too original to be an imitator, he was in his handling of English an apt pupil of Newman. There is the same ease, the same grace, the same lightness of elastic strength. Froude, like Newman, can pa.s.s from racy, colloquial vernacular, the talk of educated men who understand each other, to heights of genuine eloquence, where the resources of our grand old English tongue are drawn out to the full. His vocabulary was large and various. He was familiar with every device of rhetoric. He could play with every pipe in the language, and sound what stop he pleased. Oxford men used to talk very much in those days, and have talked more or less ever since, about the Oriel style. Perhaps the best example of it is Church, the accomplished Dean of St. Paul's. Church does not rival Newman and Froude at their best. But he never, as they sometimes do, falls into loose and slipshod writing. He was the fine flower of the old Oxford education, growing in hedged gardens, sheltered from the winds of heaven, such as Catullus painted in everlasting colours long centuries ago. Froude was a man of the world, who knew the cla.s.sics, and the minds of men, and cities, and governments, and the various races which make up the medley of the universe. He wrote for the mult.i.tude who read books for relaxation, who want to have their facts clearly stated, and their thinking done for them. He satisfied all their requirements, and yet he expressed himself with the natural eloquence of a fastidious scholar. Lucky indeed were the editors who could obtain the services of such a reviewer, and he was fortunate in being able to recommend with power the poetry of his friend, Matthew Arnold.*

- * His recommendation was entirely sincere. "Matt. A.'s Sohrab and Rustum," he wrote to Clough, "is to my taste all but perfect."

- Although Froude enjoyed with avidity the conversation of his chosen friends, he was not satisfied with intellectual epicureanism. He was resolved to make for himself a name, to leave behind him some not unworthy memorial. The history of the Reformation attracted him strongly. If an historian is a man of science, or a mere chronicler, then certainly Froude was not an historian. He made no claim to be impartial. He held that the Oxford Movement was not only endangering the National Church, but injuring the national character and corrupting men's knowledge of the past. He believed in the Reformation first as an historic fact, and secondly as a beneficent revolt of the laity against clerical dominion. He denied that since the Reformation there had been one Catholic Church, and as an Englishman he a.s.serted in the language of the Articles that the Bishop of Rome had no jurisdiction within this realm of England. He wanted to vindicate the reformers, and to prove that in the struggle against Papal Supremacy English patriots took the side of the king. He was roused to indignation by slanders against the character of Elizabeth; and he held, as almost every one now holds, that the attempt to make an innocent saint of Mary Stuart was futile. Even More and Fisher he refused to accept as candidates for the crown of martyrdom. They were both excellent men. More was, in some respects, a great man. They were certainly far more virtuous than the king who put them to death. But they were executed for treason, not for heresy, and to clear their memory it is necessary to show that they had no part in conspiring with a foreign Power against their lawful sovereign. That Power, the Church of Rome, a Power till 1870, Froude cordially hated. He regarded it as an obstacle to progress, an enemy of freedom, an enslaver of the intellect and the soul. The English Catholics of his own time were mild, honourable, and loyal. Although they had been relieved of their disabilities, they had no power. Froude's reading and reflection led him to infer that when the Church was powerful it aimed a deadly blow at English independence, and that Henry VIII., with all his moral failings, was ent.i.tled to the credit of averting it. These opinions were not new. They were held by most people when Froude was a boy. It was from Oxford that an attack upon them came, and from Oxford came also, in the person of Froude, their champion.

Froude's historical work took at first the form of essays, chiefly in The Westminster Review and Fraser's Magazine. The Rolls Series of State Papers had not then begun, and the reign of Henry was imperfectly understood. Froude was especially attracted by the age of Elizabeth, who admired her father as a monarch, whatever she may have thought of him as a man. It was an age of mighty dramatists, of divine poets, of statesmen wise and magnanimous, if not great, of seamen who made England, not Spain, the ruler of the seas. It was with the seamen that Froude began. His essay on England's Forgotten Worthies, which appeared in The Westminster Review for 1852, was suggested by a new, and very bad, edition of Hakluyt. It inspired Kingsley with the idea of his historical novel, Westward Ho! and Tennyson drew from it, many years later, the story of his n.o.ble poem, The Revenge. The eloquence is splendid, and the patriotic fervour stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet. The cruelties of the Spaniards in South America, perpetrated in the name of Holy Church, are described with unflinching fidelity and unsparing truth. For instance, four hundred French Huguenots were ma.s.sacred in cold blood by Spaniards, who invaded their settlement in Florida at a time when France was at peace with Spain. These Protestants were flayed alive, and, to show that it was done in the cause of religion, an inscription was suspended over their bodies, "Not as Frenchmen, but as heretics." Even at this distance of time it is satisfactory to reflect that these defenders of the faith were not left to the slow judgment of G.o.d. A French privateer, Dominique de Gourges, whose name deserves to be held in honour and remembrance, sailed from Roch.e.l.le, collected a body of American Indians, swooped down upon the Spanish forts, and hanged their pious inmates, wretches not less guilty than the authors of St. Bartholomew, with the appropriate legend, "Not as Spaniards, but as murderers." "It was at such a time," says Froude, "and to take their part amidst such scenes as these, that the English navigators appeared along the sh.o.r.es of South America as the armed soldiers of the Reformation, and as the avengers of humanity." Hawkins, Drake, Raleigh, Davis, Grenville, are bright names in the annals of British seamanship. But they were not merely staunch patriots, and loyal subjects of the great Queen; they were pioneers of civil and religious freedom from the most grievous yoke and most intolerable bondage that had ever oppressed mankind.

In The Westminster for 1853 appeared Froude's essay on the Book of Job, which may be taken as his final expression of theological belief. Henceforward he turned from theology to history, from speculation to fact. Even his friendship for Frederic Maurice could not rouse him to any great interest in the latter's expulsion from King's College. "As thinkers," he wrote to Clough on the 22nd of November, 1853, "Maurice, and still more the Mauricians, appear to me the most hopelessly imbecile that any section of the world have been driven to believe in. I am glad you liked Job, though my writing it was a mere accident, and I am not likely to do more of the kind. I am going to stick to the History in spite of your discouragement, and I believe I shall make something of it. At any rate one has substantial stuff between one's fingers to be moulding at, and not those slime and sea sand ladders to the moon 'opinion.'"

Froude pursued his studies, reading all the collections of original doc.u.ments in Strype and other chroniclers. Why, he asked himself should Henry, this b.l.o.o.d.y and ferocious tyrant, have been so popular in his own lifetime? Parliament, judges, juries, all the articulate cla.s.ses of the community, why had they stood by him? No doubt he could dissolve Parliament, and dismiss the judges. But to submit without a struggle, without even protest or remonstrance, was not like Englishmen, before or since. When Erasmus visited England he found that the laity were the best read and the best behaved in Europe, while the clergy were gluttonous, profligate, and avaricious. No historian ever prepared himself more thoroughly for his task than Froude. Sir Francis Palgrave, the Deputy Keeper of the Records under Sir John Romilly, offered to let him see the unpublished doc.u.ments in the Chapter House at Westminster which dealt with the later years of Wolsey's Government, and to the action of Parliament after the Cardinal' s fall. He examined them thoroughly, and accepted Parker's proposal that he should write the history of the period. But he had to leave Plas Gwynant. The London Library, which Carlyle had founded, sufficed for contributions to magazines. History was a more serious affair, and it was necessary for him to be, if not in London, at least near a railway. He returned to his native county, and took a house at Babbicombe, from which, after three years, he moved to Bideford. He made frequent visits to London, where he was the guest of his publisher, John Parker, at whose table he met Arthur Helps, John and Richard Doyle, Cornewall Lewis, Richard Trench, then Dean of Westminster, and Henry Thomas Buckle, once famous as a scientific historian. He called on the Carlyles at their house in Chelsea, and began an intimacy only broken by death. Carlyle himself was an excellent adviser in Froude's peculiar field. He had the same Puritan leanings, the same sympathy with the Reformation, the same hostility to ecclesiastical interference with secular affairs, unless, as in the case of John Knox, the interference was directed against Rome. Froude considered him not unlike Knox in humour, keenness of intellect, integrity, and daring. History was the one form of literature outside Goethe and Burns for which he really cared. He had translated Wilhelm Meister in 1824, and it was probably at his suggestion that Froude translated Elective Affinities for Bohn's Library in 1850. Scottish history and Scottish character Carlyle knew as he knew his Bible. His a.s.sistance and encouragement, which were freely given, proved invaluable to Froude.

Froude settled steadily down to work, dividing his time between London and Devonshire. Shooting and fishing had for the time to be dropped. For recreation he joined an archery club, where, as James Spedding told him, you were always sure of your game. In after life Froude, who never bore malice, used to say that his father had been right in leaving him to his own resources, and that the necessity of providing for himself was, in his instance, as in so many others, the foundation of his career. He owed much to his publisher, John Parker, who was liberal, generous, and confiding. Publishers, like mothers-in-law, have got a bad name from bad jokes. Parker, by trusting Froude, and relieving him from anxiety while he wrote, smoothed the way for a memorable contribution to English history which after many vicissitudes has now an established place as a work of genius and research.

The principles on which he worked are explained in a contribution to the volume of Oxford Essays for the year 1855. The subject of this brilliant though forgotten paper is the best means of teaching English history, and the author's judgments upon modern historians are peculiar. Hume and Hallam, the latter of whom was still living, are indiscriminately condemned. Macaulay, whose first two volumes were already famous, is ignored. The Oxford examiners are severely censured for prescribing Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors as authoritative, and Carlyle's Cromwell, a collection of materials rather than a book, is p.r.o.nounced to be the one good modern history, though Froude denounces, with friendly candour, Carlyle's "distempered antagonism to the prevailing fashions of the age." The most characteristic part of this essay, however, is that which recommends the Statutes, with their preambles, as the best text- book, and the following pa.s.sage would be confidently a.s.signed by most critics to the History itself:

"Who now questions, to mention an extreme instance, that Anne Boleyn's death was the result of the licentious caprice of Henry? and yet her own father, the Earl of Wiltshire, her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, the hero of Flodden Field, the Privy Council, the House of Lords, the Archbishop and Bishopsm, the House of Commons, the Grand Jury of Middles.e.x, and three other juries, a.s.sented without, as far as we know, an opposing voice, to the proofs of her guilt, and approved of the execution of the sentence against her."

Froude was not, however, so much absorbed in the work of his life that he could not form and express strong opinions upon the great events pa.s.sing around him. His view of the Russian war and of the French alliance was set forth with much plainness of speech in a letter to Max Muller:*

"I felt in the autumn (and you were angry at me for saying so) that the very worst thing which could happen for Europe would be the success of the policy with which France and England were managing things. Happily the G.o.ds were against it too, as now, after having between us wasted sixty millions of money and fifty thousand human lives, we are beginning to discover. But I have no hope that things will go right, or that men will think reasonably, until they have first exhausted every mode of human folly. I still think Louis Napoleon the d-d'est rascal in Europe (for which again you will be angry with me), and that his reception the other day in London will hereafter appear in history as simply the most shameful episode in the English annals. Thinking this, you will not consider my opinion good for anything, and therefore I need not inflict it upon you. Humbugs, however, will explode in the present state of the atmosphere, and the Austrian humbug, for instance, is at last, G.o.d be praised for it, exploding. John Bull, I suppose, will work himself into a fine fever about that; but he will think none the worse of the old ladies in Downing Street who are made fools of: and will be none the better disposed to listen to people who told him all along how it would be. However, in the penal fatuity which has taken possession of our big bow-wow people, and in even the general folly, I see great ground for comfort to quiet people like myself; and if I live fifteen years, I still hope I shall see a Republic among us."

- * April 30th, 1855. -

Froude's Republicanism did not last. His opinion of Louis Napoleon never altered.

CHAPTER IV

THE HISTORY

"It has not yet become superfluous to insist," said the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge on the 26th of January, 1903, "that history is a science, no less and no more." If this view is correct and exhaustive, Froude was no historian. He must remain outside the pale in the company of Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Mommsen. Among literary historians, the special detestation of the pseudo-scientific school, Froude was pre-eminent. Few things excite more suspicion than a good style, and no theory is more plausible than that which a.s.sociates clearness of expression with shallowness of thought. Froude, however, was no fine writer, no coiner of phrases for phrases' sake. A mere chronicler of events he would hardly have cared to be. He had a doctrine to propound, a gospel to preach. "The Reformation," he said, "was the hinge on which all modern history turned,"* and he regarded the Reformation as a revolt of the laity against the clergy, rather than a contest between two sets of rival dogmas for supremacy over the human mind. That is the key of the historical position which he took up from the first, and always defended. He held the Church of Rome to have been the enemy of human freedom, and of British independence. He was devoid of theological prejudice, and never reviled Catholicism as Newman reviled it before his conversion. But he held that the reformers, alike in England, in France, and in Germany, were fighting for truth, honesty, and private judgment against priestcraft and ecclesiastical tyranny. The scepticism and cynicism of which he was often accused were on the surface. They were provoked by what he felt to be hypocrisy and sham. They were not his true self. He believed firmly unflinchingly, and always in "the grand, simple landmarks of morality," which existed before all Churches, and would exist if all Churches disappeared.

Ou gar tanun ge kachthes, all' aei pote Ze tauta, koudeis oiden ex hotou phane ["For they are not of today or yesterday, but these things live for ever, but no one knows from whence they appear." Sophocles, Antigone, 456.]

Before Abraham was they were, and it is impossible to imagine a time when they will have ceased to be.

- * Lectures on the Council of Trent, p. 1. -

Froude was an Erastian, holding that the Church should be subordinate to the State. True religion is incompatible with persecution. But true religion is rare, and the best modern security against the persecutor is the secular power. Mr. Spurgeon once excited great applause from members of his Church by declaring that the Baptists had never persecuted. When the cheers had subsided he explained that it was because they had never had a chance. Froude was convinced that ecclesiastics could not be trusted, and that they would oppress the laity unless the laity muzzled them. He held that the reformers had been calumniated, that their services were in danger of being forgotten, and that the modern attempt to ignore the Reformation was not only unhistorical, but disingenuous. He wrote partly to rehabilitate them, and partly to prove that Henry VIII. had conferred great benefits upon England by his repudiation of Papal authority. He took, as he considered it his duty to take, the side of individual liberty against ecclesiastical authority, and of England against Rome. The idea that an historian was to have no opinions of his own, or that, having them, he was to conceal them, never entered his mind.

That Froude had any prejudice against the Church of England as such is a baseless fancy. He believed in the Church of his childhood, and, unless the word be used in the narrow sense of the clerical profession, he never left it to the end of his days. It was to him, as it was to his father, a Protestant Church, out of communion with Rome, cut off from the Pope and his court by the great upheaval of the sixteenth century. It is unreasonable, and indeed foolish, to say that that opinion disqualified him to be the historian of Henry VIII., and Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth. The Catholicism of Lingard is not considered to be a disqualification by sensible Protestants. Froude's faults as an historian were of a different kind, and had nothing to do with his ecclesiastical views. He was not the only Erastian, nor was he an Erastian pure and simple. He has left it on record that Macaulay's unfairness to Cranmer in the celebrated review of Hallam's Const.i.tutional History first suggested to him the project of his own book. His besetting sin was not so much Erastianism, or secularism, as a love of paradox. Henry VIII seemed to him not merely a great statesman and a true patriot, but a victim of persistent misrepresentation, whose lofty motives had been concealed, and displaced by vile, baseless calumnies. More and Fisher, honoured for three centuries as saints, he suspected, and, as he thought, discovered to have been traitors who justly expiated their offences on the block. He was not satisfied with proving that there was a case for Henry, and that the triumph of Rome would have been the end of civil as well as spiritual freedom: he must go on to whitewash the tyrant himself, and to prove that his marriage with Anne Boleyn, like his separation from Katharine of Aragon, was simply the result of an unselfish desire to provide the country with a male heir. The refusal of More and Fisher to acknowledge the royal supremacy may show that they were Catholics first and Englishmen afterwards, without impugning their personal integrity, or justifying the malice of Thomas Cromwell. To judge Henry as if he were a const.i.tutional king with a secure t.i.tle, in no more danger from Catholics than Louis XIV was from Huguenots, is doubtless preposterous. If the Catholics had got the upper hand, they would have deposed him, and put him to death. In that fell strife of mighty opposites the voice of toleration was not raised, and would not have been heard. Tyrant as he was himself, Henry in his battle against Rome did represent the English people, and his cause was theirs. Froude brought out this great truth, and to bring it out was a great service. Unfortunately he went too far the other way, and impartial readers who had no sympathy with Cardinal Campeggio were revolted by what looked like a defence of cruel persecution. The welfare of a nation is more important in history than the observance of any marriage; and if Henry had been guided by mere desire, there was no reason why he should marry Anne Boleyn at all. Froude's achievement, which, despite all criticism, remains, was marred or modified by his too obvious zeal for upsetting established conclusions and reversing settled beliefs.

The moment that Froude had made up his mind, which was not till after long and careful research, he began to paint a picture. The lights were delicately and adroitly arranged. The artist's eye set all accessories in the most telling positions. He was an advocate, an incomparably brilliant advocate, in his mode of presenting a case. But it was his own case, the case in which he believed, not a case he had been retained to defend. When he came to deal with Elizabeth he was on firmer ground. By that time the Reformation was an accomplished fact, and the fiercest controversies lay behind him. Disgusted as he was with the scandals invented against the virgin queen, he did not shrink from exposing the duplicity and meanness which tarnish the l.u.s.tre of her imperishable renown. Like Knox, he was insensible to the charms of Mary Stuart, and that is a deficiency hard to forgive in a man. Yet who can deny that Elizabeth only did to Mary as Mary would have done to her? The morality of the Guises was as much a part of Mary as her scholarship, her grace, her profound statecraft, the courage which a voluptuous life never imparted. Froude was not thinking of her, or of any woman. He was thinking of England. Between the fall of Wolsey and the defeat of the Armada was decided the great question whether England should be Catholic or Protestant, bond or free. The dazzling Queen of Scots, like the virtuous Chancellor and the holy Bishop, were on the wrong side. Henry and Elizabeth, with all their faults, were on the right one. That is the pith and marrow of Froude's book. Those who think that in history there is no side may blame him. He followed Carlyle. "Froude is a man of genius," said Jowett: "he has been abominably treated." "Il a vu iuste," said a young critic of our own day* in reply to the usual charges of inaccuracy. The real object of his attack was that ecclesiastical corruption which belongs to no Church exclusively, and is older than Christianity itself.

- * Arthur Strong. -

The main portion of Froude's life for nearly twenty years was occupied with his History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is on a large scale, in twelve volumes. Every chapter bears ample proof of laborious study. Froude neglected no source of information, and spared himself no pains in pursuit of it. At the Record Office, in the British Museum, at Hatfield, among the priceless archives preserved in the Spanish village of Simancas, he toiled with unquenchable ardour and unrelenting a.s.siduity. Nine-tenths of his authorities were in ma.n.u.script. They were in five languages. They filled nine hundred volumes. Excellent linguist as he was, Froude could hardly avoid falling into some errors. With his general accuracy as an historian I shall have to deal in a later part of this book. Here I am only concerned to prove that he took unlimited pains. He kept no secretary, he was his own copyist, and he was not a good proof- reader. Those natural blots, quas aut incuria fudit, aut humaria parum cavit natura, are to be found, no doubt, in his pages. From a conscientious obedience to truth as he understood it, and a resolute determination to present it as he saw it, he never swerved. He was not a chronicler, but an artist, a moralist, and a man of genius. Unless an historian can put himself into the place of the men about whom he is writing, think their thoughts, share their hopes, their aspirations, and their fears, he had better be taking a healthy walk than poring over dusty doc.u.ments. A paste-pot, a pair of scissors, the mechanical precision of a copying clerk, are all useful in their way; but they no more make an historian than a cowl makes a monk.

Polloi men narthekophoroi Bakchoi de te pauroi ["There are many officials, but few inspired." Zen.o.bius, 5.77]

There are many writers of history, but very few historians. Froude wrote with a definite purpose, which he never concealed from himself, or from others. He believed, and he thought he could prove, that the Reformation freed England from a cruel and degrading yoke, that the things which were Caesar's should be rendered to Caesar, and that the Church should be restricted within its own proper sphere. Those, if such there be, who think that an historian should have no opinions are ent.i.tled to condemn him. Those who simply disagree with him are not. No man is hindered by any other cause than laziness, incompetence, or more immediately profitable occupations, from writing a history of the same period in exactly the opposite sense.

Froude's earliest chapters were set in type, and distributed among a few friends whose judgment he trusted. The most sympathetic was Carlyle, who p.r.o.nounced the introductory survey of England's social condition at the opening of the sixteenth century to be just what it ought to have been. Carlyle's marginal notes upon the first two chapters are extremely interesting, and doubly characteristic, because they ill.u.s.trate at the same time his practical shrewdness and his intense prejudice. For these reasons, and also because in many instances his advice was followed, it may be worth while to give some account of his pencil jottings, written when Carlyle's hand was still firm, and as legible as they were fifty years ago. Upon the first chapter as a whole, Carlyle's judgment, though critical, was highly favourable.

"This," he wrote, "is a vigorous, sunny, calm, and wonderfully effective delineation; pleasant to read; and bids fair to give much elucidation to what is coming. Curious too as got mainly from good reading of the Statutes at large! Might there be with advantage (or not) some subdivision into sections, with headings, etc? Also, here and there, some condensation of the excerpts given-condensation into narrative where too longwinded? Item, for symmetry's sake (were there nothing else) is not some outline of spiritual England a little to be expected? Or will that come piece-meal as we proceed? Hint, then, somewhere to that effect? Also remember a little that there was an Europe as well as an England? In sum, Euge." Such praise from such a man was balm to Froude's wounds and tonic to his nerves. Practically expelled from his college, regarded by his own family as almost a black sheep, he found himself taken up, and treated as an equal, by a writer of European fame, whom of all his contemporaries he most admired. In deference to Carlyle he rewrote his opening paragraphs, and added useful dates. European history and spiritual England do come into far greater prominence "as we proceed." The abbreviation and summary of extracts might, I think, have been carried farther with advantage. But it is curious that Froude was attacked for the precisely opposite fault of treating his authorities with too much freedom. Carlyle, who knew what historical labour was, saw at once that Froude dealt with his material as a born student and an ardent lover of truth. His suggestions were always excellent, as sound and just as they were careful and kind. One criticism, which Froude disregarded, shows not only Carlyle's wide knowledge (that appears throughout), but also that his long residence south of the Tweed never made him really English. It refers to Froude's description of the English volunteers at Calais who "were for years the terror of Normandy," and of Englishmen generally as "the finest people in all Europe," nurtured in profuse abundance on "great shins of beef."

"This," says Carlyle, "seems to me exaggerated; what we call John- Bullish. The English are not, in fact, stronger, braver, truer, or better than the other Teutonic races: they never fought better than the Dutch, Prussians, Swedes, etc., have done. For the rest, modify a little: Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops (bread boiled in beer), Robert Burns on oatmeal porridge; and Mahomet and the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal."

David Hume would have thoroughly approved of this note. Froude's patriotism was incorrigible, and he left the pa.s.sage as it stood. A little farther on Carlyle's hatred of political economy, in which Froude fully shared, breaks out with amusing vigour. "If," wrote the younger historian, "the tendency of trade to a.s.sume a form of mere self-interest be irresistible," etc. "And is it?" comments the elder. "Let us all get prussic acid, then." A recent speculator preferred cyanide of pota.s.sium. But if "mere self-interest" comprises fraudulent balance-sheets, it cannot claim any support from political economy. When Carlyle drew up a pet.i.tion to the House of Commons for amending the law of copyright, he was guided by self- interest, but it was not a counsel of despair. The City Companies, says Froude, "are all which now remain of a vast organisation which once penetrated the entire trading life of England-an organisation set on foot to realise that impossible condition of commercial excellence under which man should deal faithfully with his brother, and all wares offered for sale, of whatever kind, should honestly be what they pretend to be."

For "impossible" Carlyle proposed "highly necessary, if highly difficult," and a similar change was made. But why people who do not understand political economy should be more honest than those who do neither master nor disciple condescended to explain. It is much easier to preach than to argue. More valuable than these gibes is Carlyle's reminder that guilds were not peculiar to England.

"In Lubeck, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Dantzig, not to speak of Venice, Genoa, Pisa,-George Hudson and the Gospel of Cheap and Nasty were totally unknown ent.i.ties. The German Gilds even made poetry together; Herr Sachs of Nurnberg was one of the finest pious genial master shoemakers that ever lived anywhere-his shoes and rhymes alike genuine (I can speak for the rhymes) and worthy."

It is strange that Carlyle should have taken the trouble to correct a misquotation from Juvenal, and still stranger that Froude should have left the words uncorrected. Misquotation was a too frequent habit with him. In his second chapter he applies to Henry the famous pa.s.sage in Tacitus's character of Galba, and changes capax imperii to dignus imperil, though dignus would have required imperio, and would then have made inferior sense. Some of Carlyle's queries were productive of really substantial results; for instance, the simple words "such as" brought out the fact that the spoils of the monasteries were in part devoted to national defence. "Inveterate frenzy" is Froude's description of the years covered by the reign of Edward IV. "Fine healthy years in the main, for all their fighting," notes Carlyle. "See the Paston Letters, for one proof." Some of his recommendations are racily colloquial. "Give us time of day" is his mode of asking for more dates. Henry's instructions to his Secretary or Amba.s.sador at Rome he p.r.o.nounces "very rough matter to set upon the table uncooked," and recommends an Appendix, unluckily without avail. "Abridge, redact," he exclaims towards the end, but there was no abridgment and no redaction. On the other hand, "prestige," stigmatised by Carlyle as "a bad newspaper word," was rejected for "influence," and his insistence that English only should be used in the text, foreign languages being confined to notes, was accepted by Froude. That "new doctrines ever gain readiest hearing among the common people" he left to stand as a general proposition, although, as Carlyle reminded him, "in Germany it was by no means the common people who believed Luther first, but the Elector of Saxony, Philip of Hesse, etc., etc.-Scotland too."

The conclusion at which Carlyle arrived after reading the second chapter is less favourable than his verdict upon the first. Inasmuch, however, as some of the modifications suggested were made, though by no means all of them, and as Carlyle's notions of history are worth knowing on their own account, I will transcribe his words, which are dated the 27th of September, 1855:

"This chapter contains a great deal of well meditated knowledge, just insight, and sound thinking; seems calculated to explain the Phaenomenon of the Reformation to an unusual degree, in fact has great merit of many kinds, historical among the rest. But it seems to me (1) to be more of a Dissertation than a Narrative; to want dates, specific details, outline of every kind. (2) The management might surely be mended? It does not "begin at the beginning" (which indeed is the most difficult of all things, but also the most indispensable); the story is not clear; or rather, as hinted above, there is no story, but an explanation of some story supposed to be already known, which is contrary to rule in writing 'History.' On the whole, the Author seems to have such a conception of the subject as were well worth a better setting forth; and if this is all he has yet written of his Book, I could almost advise him to start afresh, and remodel all this second chapter. This is a high demand; but the excellence attainable by him seems also high. The rule throughout is, that events should speak. Commentary ought to be sparing; clear insight, definite conviction, brought about with a minimum of Commentary; that is always the Art of History. Alter or not, however, there is such a generous breadth of intelligence, of manly sympathy, sound judgment, and in general of luminous solidity, promised in this Book, that I will gladly read it, however it be put together. Would it not be better to specify a little what Martin Luther is about, and keep up a chronological intercourse, more or less strict, with the great Continental ocean of Reform, the better to understand the tides from it that ebb and flow in these Narrow Seas? Some notice of Wiclif too I expected in some form or other. Once more, Go on and prosper!"

The notice of Wycliffe does seem a rather unreasonable expectation, and a history of England loses ident.i.ty if it becomes a history of Europe. But Carlyle's principles, whether he always acted upon them himself or no, are excellent, and, though Froude's second chapter was not quite rewritten, the effect of them may be seen in the rest of the book.

Carlyle's influence upon Froude, which happily never extended to his style, confirmed him in his attachment to Protestantism and his hatred of Rome. It also accounted for much of Froude's belief in despots. In democracy he had no faith. Manhood suffrage in England, would, he thought, even in the wonderful year 1588, the last of his History, have restored the Pope. This was perhaps a little inconsistent with his theory that Henry VIII. had been popular with all cla.s.ses. Yet at least Froude could distinguish one despot from another. He was entirely opposed, as we have seen, to the alliance with Louis Napoleon against Russia, which culminated in the Crimean War. Otherwise his sympathy with Liberalism was chiefly academic. He rejoiced in the University Commission, and in the consequent removal of religious tests for undergraduates. But he took Carlyle's Latter- Day Pamphlets for gospel, and had no faith in peace by great Exhibitions, or progress by political reform. The war with Russia justified the first part of his creed, and even Liberals in the House of Commons seemed tacitly to agree with the second. To the glorification of mere money-making, the worship of the golden calf, the sincerest and the most fashionable of all worships, both he and Carlyle were equally opposed. They were agreed with the Socialists and with Ruskin in their dislike of seeing bricks and mortar subst.i.tuted for green fields, smoky chimneys for church towers, myriads of factory hands for the rural population of England. Carlyle still called himself a Radical, a believer in root and branch change, but moral rather than political. His faith in representative inst.i.tutions had been shaken by reflecting that the Long Parliament, the best ever a.s.sembled in England, would have given up the cause of the Civil War if it had not been for Cromwell and the army. Although he had been one of Peel's warmest supporters in 1846, he had come to dread Liberalism as tending towards anarchy, and he adopted the singular verbal fallacy that a low franchise would mean a low standard of politics. Froude, though he still called himself a Liberal, and in some respects always was so, swore by Carlyle, acknowledged him as his master, and repeated his creed. Carlyle had many admirers, but few disciples, and he naturally set great value on Froude's adhesion. He had always a great contempt for universal suffrage. It would have given, he said grimly, the same voice in the government of Palestine to Jesus Christ and to Judas Iscariot. But whatever might have happened to Judas, the Son of man had not where to lay His head, and would certainly have been excluded under any system which met the approval of Carlyle. In Latter-Day Pamphlets Carlyle had made a tremendous attack upon Downing Street, and the administrative deficiencies which the Crimean campaign disclosed could be treated as confirmatory evidence in his favour. As a matter of fact, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston were all the same to him. He was denouncing the Parliamentary system, which has borne up against worse Ministers than the Duke of Newcastle. If Sebastopol had been taken after the Alma, as it well might have been, Carlyle would not have altered his tone. Nothing would have prevented him from delivering his message, or Froude from accepting it.

The first two volumes of the History appeared in 1856. They dealt with the latter part of Henry's reign, when he had rid himself of Wolsey, and was personally ruling England with the aid of Thomas Cromwell. Froude had to describe the dissolution of the monasteries, and besides describing he justified it. He had to depict the absolute government of Henry; and he argued that it was a necessity of the times. We must not transfer the pa.s.sions of one age to the controversies of another. In the seventeenth century the issue was between the Stuart kings and their Parliaments, or, in other words, between the Crown and the people. In the sixteenth century king and Parliament were united against an alien power, the Catholic Church, and a foreign prince, the Pope. Before England was free she had to become Protestant, and Henry, whatever his motives, was on the Protestant side. That he was himself an unscrupulous tyrant is beside the point. He was an ephemeral phaemomenon, and, as a matter of fact, his tyranny, which the people never felt, died with him. The Church of Rome was a permanent fact, immortal, if not unchangeable, which would have reduced England, if it had prevailed, to the condition of France, Italy, and Spain. Whether Henry VIII. was a good man, or a bad one, is not the question. Bishop Stubbs, who cannot be accused of anti-ecclesiastical, or anti-theological prejudice, calls him a "grand, gross figure," not to be tried and condemned by ordinary standards of private morals. The only interest of his character now is its bearing upon the fate of England. If the Pope, and not the king, had become head of the English Church, would it have been for the advantage of the English people? By frankly taking the king's side Froude made two different and influential sets of enemies, especially at Oxford. High Churchmen, then and for the rest of his life, a.s.sailed him for hostility to "the Church," forgetting or ignoring the fact that the Church of England is not the Church of Rome. Liberals, on the other hand, mistook him for a friend of lawless despotism, as if Henry's opponents had been const.i.tutional statesmen, and not arrogant Churchmen, hating liberty even more than he did.

That Froude had no faith in modern Liberalism is true enough. His political leader in 1856 was neither Palmerston nor Cobden, but Carlyle. In 1529 he would have been a King's man and not a Pope's man, an Englishman first and a Churchman afterwards. Lord Melbourne used to declare, in his paradoxical manner, that Henry VIII. was the greatest man who ever lived, because he always had his own way.

Strength is not greatness, and Melbourne must not be taken literally. What can be pleaded for Henry, without paradox and with truth, is that he imposed upon Catholic and Protestant alike the supremacy of the law. Froude preached the subordination of the Church to the State; and while supporters of the voluntary principle regarded him with suspicion, adherents to the sacerdotal principle shrank from him with horror.

The reviews of Froude's earliest volumes were mostly unfavourable.

The Times indeed was appreciative and sympathetic. But The Christian Remembrancer was emphatic in its censure, and The Edinburgh Review, of which Henry Reeve had just become editor, was vehemently hostile.

After all, however, an author depends, not upon this party, nor upon that party, but upon the general public. The public took to Froude's History from the first. They took to it because it interested them, and carried them on. Paradoxical it might be. Partial it might be. Readable it undoubtedly was. Parker's confidence was more than justified. The book sold as no history had sold except Gibbon's and Macaulay's. There were no obscure, no ugly sentences. The reader was carried down the stream with a motion all the pleasanter because it was barely perceptible. The name of the author was in all mouths. His old college perceived that he was a credit, not a disgrace to it, and the Rector of Exeter* courteously invited him to replace his name on the books. The Committee of the Athenaeum elected him an honorary member of the Club. Even the Archdeacon, now a very old man, discovered at last that his youngest son was an honour to the name of Froude. He knew something of ecclesiastical history, and he understood that the character of Henry, which certainly left much to be desired, might have been blackened of set purpose by ecclesiastical historians. Froude's reputation was made. The reviewers, most of whom knew nothing about the subject, could not hurt him. He had followed his bent, and chosen his vocation well. The gift of narrative was his, and he had had thoughts of turning novelist. But to write a novel, or at least a successful novel, was a thing he could never do. He had not the spirit of romance. If there was anything romantic in him, it was love of England, and of the sea. From the ocean rovers of Elizabeth to the colonial path-finders of his own day, he delighted in men who carried the name and fame of England to distant places of the earth. He was an advocate rather than a judge. He held so strongly the correctness of his own views, and the importance of having a right judgment in all things, that he sometimes gave undue prominence to the facts which supported his theory. It was only fair and reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic of Froude as an historian. That he deliberately falsified history is a baseless delusion. A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it would have been difficult to find. An artist he could not help being, for it was in the blood. Once his fingers grasped the pen, they began instinctively to draw a picture. He was not, like Macaulay, a rhetorician. He had inherited from his father a contempt for oratory, and he did not speak well in public. But when he had studied a period he saw it in a series of moving scenes as the figures pa.s.sed along the stage. That he was not always accurate in detail is notorious. Accuracy is a question of degree. There are mistakes in Macaulay. There are mistakes in Gibbon. Humanum est effete. An historian must be judged not by the number of slips he has made in names or dates, but by the general conformity of his representation with the object. Ca.n.a.letto painted pictures of Venice in which there was not a palace out of drawing, nor a brick out of place. Yet not all Ca.n.a.letto's Venetian pictures would give a stranger much idea of the atmosphere of Venice. Glance at one Turner, in which a Venetian could hardly identify a building or a ca.n.a.l, and there lies before you the Queen of the Sea. Serious blunders have been discovered by microscopic criticism in Carlyle's French Revolution; it remains the most vivid and impressive version of a tremendous drama that has ever been given to the world. Froude and Carlyle had the same scorn of the mult.i.tude, the same belief in destiny, the same love of truth. Froude was more sceptical, less inclined to hero-worship, far more academic in thought and style. They agreed in setting the moral lessons of history above any theory of scientific development, and in cultivating the human interest of the narrative as that which alone abides.

- * Dr. Lightfoot. -

That Froude set out with a polemical purpose is not to be denied. He had seen enough of the Romanist or Anglican revival to dislike it heartily, and he held that Protestant countries were the most prosperous because they were morally the best. Although he did not accept the Evangelical theology, he thought Calvinism the most philosophic form of religious belief, and Puritanism the soundest sort of ethical creed. The Church of England as understood by his father was to him the healthiest of ecclesiastical inst.i.tutions, teaching G.o.dliness, inculcating duty, saying as little as possible about dogma. Religion, he said, was meant to be obeyed, not to be examined. The sun was invaluable, unless you looked at it If you looked at it, you saw neither it nor anything else. But for the Reformation, England, like France, might be under a worthless despot sanctified by the Church, or, like Spain, be trampled under the feet of priests. The statutes of Henry VIII. were the t.i.tle- deeds of the English Church. Henry established the supremacy of the State by letters patent, praemunire, and conge d'elire. The old bluebeard Henry, who spent his whole time in murdering his wives, was a nursery toy. The real Henry put two wives to death by lawful means on definite and substantial charges of which death was the penalty. His subjects were quite as anxious as he could be that he should have a male heir, and few now suppose that Anne Boleyn, or Katharine Howard, was faithful to her husband. The Church of Rome would have dethroned Henry and incited his subjects to rebellion. It was war to the knife, and the King won.

Froude regarded Henry's victory as the salvation of England. The dissolution of the monasteries was an incident in the struggle, necessary for the public interest, and justified by the evidence. Although part of their confiscated property was bestowed upon statesmen and courtiers, part went to found new Cathedral colleges, or grammar schools, and part to strengthen the national defences. Henry was a strange mixture, quite as much patriot as tyrant, and not safe enough on his throne to tolerate Popery. In Froude's view he stood for the nation. More and Fisher were for a foreign power. The time with which Froude chose to deal was full of blazing fire, which the ashes of three hundred years imperfectly covered. He did not realise the ordeal to which he was exposing himself, the malice he was stirring up. His whole life had been a preparation for the task. When he had the free run of his father's library after leaving Westminster, it was to the historical shelves that he went first; and while his brother talked eloquently about the evils of the Reformation, he himself was studying its causes. His own entanglement in the Anglican revival was personal, accidental, and brief. It was due entirely to his affectionate admiration for Newman, aided perhaps, if by anything, by curiosity to know something about the lives of the saints. For a real saint, such as Hugh of Lincoln, he had a sincere reverence, and loved to show it. The miraculous element disgusted him, and the more he read of ecclesiastical performances the more anti-ecclesiastical he became.

The article in The Edinburgh Review for July, 1858, upon Froude's first four volumes is an elaborate, an able, and a bitter attack. Henry Reeve, the editor of The Edinburgh at that time, and for many years afterwards, was not himself a scholar, like his ill.u.s.trious predecessor, Cornewall Lewis. He was a Whig of the most conventional type, regarding Macaulay and Hallam as the ideal historians, suspicious of novelty, and dismayed by paradox. Froude's critic belonged to a more advanced school of Liberalism, and shuddered at the glorification of a "tyrant" like Henry VIII. That he had also some reason for personally detesting Froude is plain from his malicious references to the Lives of the Saints, and to The Nemesis of Faith, which Froude himself had, so far as he could, suppressed. When Froude's name was restored to the books of Exeter College in 1858, he wrote to Dr. Lightfoot, the Rector, that he regretted the publication both of The Nemesis and of Shadows of the Clouds. His object in future, he added, would be to defend the Church of England. That his idea of the Church was the same as Lightfoot's is improbable. Froude meant the Church of the Reformation, of private judgment, of an open Bible, of lay independence of bishop or priest. To that Church he was faithful, and he sympathised in sentiment, if he did not agree in dogma, with evangelical Christians. With Catholics, Roman or Anglican, he neither had nor pretended to have any sympathy at all. The Reformation is a convenient name for a complex European movement, difficult to describe, and almost impossible to define; but so far as it was English and const.i.tutional, it is embodied in the legislation of Henry VIII., which subst.i.tuted the supremacy of the Crown for the supremacy of the Pope. It was because Froude wrote avowedly in defence of that change that he incurred the bitter hostility of a powerful section in the English Church. He also irritated, partly perhaps because his tone betrayed the influence of Carlyle, a large body of Liberal opinion to which all despotism and persecution were obnoxious. The compliments, the reluctant compliments, of The Edinburgh reviewer must be taken as the admissions of an enemy. He acknowledges fully and frankly the thoroughness of Froude's research among the State Papers of the reign, not merely those printed and published by Robert Lemon, but "a large ma.n.u.script collection of copies of letters, minutes of council, theological tracts, parliamentary pet.i.tions, depositions upon trials, and miscellaneous communications upon the state of the country furnished by agents of the Government, all relating to the early years of the English Reformation." No historian has ever been more diligent than Froude was in reading and collating ma.n.u.scripts. For Henry's reign alone he read and transcribed six hundred and eighty-seven pages in his small, close handwriting. That in so doing, and in working without a.s.sistance, he should sometimes fall into error was unavoidable. But he never spared himself. He was the most laborious of students, and his History was as difficult to write as it is easy to read. He had, as this hostile reviewer says, a "genuine love of historical research," and there is point in the same critic's complaint that his pages are "over-loaded with long quotations from State Papers."

What, then, it will be asked, was the real gist of the charges made against Froude by The Edinburgh Review? The question at issue was nothing less than the whole policy of Henry's reign, and the motives of the King. The character of Henry is one of the most puzzling in historical literature, and Froude had to deal with the most difficult part of it. To the virtues of his earlier days Erasmus is an unimpeachable witness. The power of his mind and the excellence of his education are beyond dispute. He held the Catholic faith, he was not naturally cruel, and, compared with Francis I., or with Henry of Navarre, he was not licentious. But he was brought up to believe that the ordinary rules of morality do not govern kings. That the king can do no wrong is now a maxim of the Const.i.tution, and merely means that Ministers are responsible for the acts of the Crown. Henry could scarcely have been made to understand, even if there had been any one to tell him, what a const.i.tutional monarch was. Though forced to admit, and taught by experience, that he could not safely tax his subjects without the formal sanction of Parliament, he was in theory absolute, and he held it his duty to rule as well as to reign. When Charles I. argued, a century later, that a king was not bound to keep faith with his subjects, it may be doubted whether he deceived himself. The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. His duty to G.o.d Henry would always have acknowledged. A historian so widely different from Froude as Bishop Stubbs has pointed out that, if mere self-indulgence had been the king's object, the infinite pains he took to obtain a Papal divorce from Katharine of Aragon would have been thrown away. That he had a duty to his neighbour, male or female, never entered his head. His subjects were his own, to deal with as he pleased. Revolting as this theory may seem now, it was held by most people then, and there was not a man in England, not Sir Thomas More himself, who would have told the King that it was untrue.

It is with the divorce of Katharine that the difficulty of estimating Henry begins. Froude's narrative sets out with the marriage of Anne Boleyn. Here the reviewer plants his first arrow. The divorce was a nullity, having no authority higher than Cranmer's. Anne Boleyn, as is likely enough from other causes, was never the King's wife, and Elizabeth was illegitimate, though she had of course a Parliamentary t.i.tle to the throne. It seems clear, however, that inasmuch as Katharine had been his brother Prince Arthur's wife, the King could not lawfully marry her, according to the canons of the Catholic Church. Why did he marry Anne Boleyn? The reviewer says because he was in love with her, and triumphantly refers to the King's letters, printed in the Appendix of Hearne's Ayesbury.* They are undoubtedly love-letters, and they contain one indelicate expression. Compared with Mirabeau's letters to Sophie de Monnier, they are cold and chaste. Froude says that the King wanted a male heir, and he gives the same reason for the scandalously indecent haste with which Jane Seymour was married the day after Anne's execution. The character of Henry VIII. is only important now as it bears upon the policy of his reign. That Froude washed him too white is almost as certain as that Lingard painted him too black. The notion that l.u.s.t supplies the key to his marriages and their consequences is utterly ridiculous. The most dissolute of English kings was content, and more than content, with one wife. On the other hand, Froude does at least give a clue when he suggests that these frequent marriages were political moves. A female sovereign reigning in her own right had never been known in England, and up to the birth of Jane Seymour's son Edward the whole kingdom pa.s.sionately desired that there should be a Prince of Wales. Edward himself was but a sickly child, and was not expected to live even for the short span of his actual career. Credulous indeed must they be who maintain the innocence either of Anne Boleyn or of Katharine Howard, and there seems small use in holding with the learned Father Gasquet that Anne was not guilty of the offences imputed to her, but had done something too bad to be mentioned on a trial for incest. It is a question of evidence, and the evidence is lost. But the Grand Jury which presented Anne was respectable, the Court which convicted her was distinguished, and neither she nor any of her paramours denied their guilt on the scaffold. Simple adultery in a queen was capital then, if indeed it be not capital now. In an ordinary husband Henry's conduct would have been revolting. It is not attractive in him. Stubbs pleads that we cannot judge him, and abandons the attempt in despair.

- * Oxford, 1720. -

As he rejects with equal decision both the Roman Catholic picture and Froude's, he only puts us all to ignorance again. Froude is at least intelligible.

It is a fact, and not a fancy, that Henry provided from the spoils of the monasteries for the defence of the realm, that he founded new bishoprics from the same source, that he disarmed the ecclesiastical tribunals, and broke the bonds of Rome. The corruption of at least the smaller monasteries, some of which were suppressed by Wolsey before the rise of Cromwell, is established by the balance of evidence, and the disappearance of the Black Book which set forth their condition was only to be expected in the reign of Mary. The crime which weighs most upon the memory of the King is the execution of Fisher and More.