The Life of Froude Part 3

More, though he persecuted heretics, is the saint and philosopher of the age. Of Fisher Macaulay says that he was worthy to have lived in a better age, and died in a better cause. But what if these good men, from purely conscientious motives, would have brought over a Spanish army to coerce their Protestant fellow-subjects and their lawful sovereign? That, and not speculative error, is the real charge against them. Henry did all he could to put himself in the wrong. His atrocious request that More "would not use many words on the scaffold" makes one hate him after the lapse of well-nigh four hundred years. The question, however, is not one of personal feeling. Good men go wrong. Bad men are made by providence to be instruments for good. It is not More, nor Fisher, it is the Bluebeard of the children's history-books who gave England Miles Coverdale's Bible, who freed her from the yoke that oppressed France till the Revolution, and oppresses Spain to-day. Froude's first four volumes are an eloquent indictment of Ultramontanism, a plea for the Reformation, a sustained argument for English liberties and freedom of thought. No such book can be impartial in the sense of admitting that there is as much to be said on one side as on the other. Froude replied to The Edinburgh Review in Fraser's Magazine for September, 1858, and in the following month the reviewer retorted. He did not really shake the foundation of Froude's case, which was the same as Luther's. Luther, like Froude, was no democrat. To both of them the Reformation was a protest against ecclesiastical tyranny, or for spiritual freedom. "The comedy has ended in a marriage," said Erasmus of Luther and Luther's wife. It was not a comedy, and it had not ended.

Froude sometimes goes too far. When he defends the Boiling Act, under which human beings were actually boiled alive in Smithfield, he shakes confidence in his judgment. He sets too much value upon the verdicts of Henry's tribunals, forgetting Macaulay's emphatic declaration that State trials before 1688 were murder under the forms of law. Although the subject of his Prize Essay at Oxford was "The Influence of the Science of Political Economy upon the Moral and Social Welfare of a Nation," he never to the end of his life understood what political economy was. Misled by Carlyle, he conceived it to be a sort of "Gospel," a rival system to the Christian religion, instead of useful generalisations from the observed course of trade. He never got rid of the idea that Governments could fix the rate of wages and the price of goods. A more serious fault found by The Edinburgh reviewer, the ablest of all Froude's critics, was the implication rather than the a.s.sertion that Henry VIII.'s Parliaments represented the people. The House of Commons in the sixteenth century was really chosen through the Sheriffs by the Crown, and the preambles of the Statutes, upon which Froude relied as evidence of contemporary opinion, showed the opinion of the Government rather than the opinion of the people.

They are not of course on that account to be neglected. Although the House of Commons was no result of popular election, it consisted of representative Englishmen, who would hardly have acquiesced in statements notoriously untrue. Henry neither obtained nor asked the opinion of the people, as we understand the phrase. The "dim common populations" had no more to do with the Government of England then than they have to do with the Government of India now. At the same time it must be remembered that the King could not rely upon mere force. He had no standing army, and a popular rising would have swept him almost without resistance from his throne. It is almost as hard for us to imagine his position as to understand his character. Parliament, judges, magistrates, were subordinate to his sovereign will and pleasure. From the authority of the Pope he cut himself free, and neither Clement VII. nor Paul III. was strong enough to stand up against him. He could hold his own with France, with the Empire, with Spain. The one Power he never ventured to defy was the English people. It was the essence of the Tudor monarchy to rely upon the ma.s.ses rather than the cla.s.ses, to keep the aristocracy down by expressing the popular will. So far as Henry took part in it, the Reformation was not religious at all. As Macaulay drily remarks, he was a good Catholic who preferred to be his own Pope. He knew very well that Englishmen would like him none the worse for resisting the pretensions of Rome, for insisting on the royal supremacy, for taking every possible step to secure the succession in the male Tudor line. If in his callous indifference to the fate of the men or women who stood in his way he appears scarcely human, we must consider, with Bishop Stubbs, his awful isolation. The whole burden of the State was upon him, and he could not share it. Not till the reign of his elder daughter did his subjects realise the horrors from which he had delivered them.

Hostile criticism, though it affected the opinion of scholars, did Froude no harm with the public. Macaulay's popularity was at its height in 1858. But Macaulay pa.s.ses lightly in his Introduction over the sixteenth century, and the reign of Henry VIII., or at least the latter part of it, had never been so copiously ill.u.s.trated before. The Oxford Movement, which treated the Reformation as a discreditable incident worthy of oblivion, had not much influence with the laity. Nine Englishmen in ten were quite prepared to glorify the reformers, and were by no means sorry to find how much evidence there was for the good old English view of a Parliamentary Church. The Statutes of Supremacy and of Praemunire, even the execution of More and Fisher, reminded them that the Bishop of Rome neither had nor ought to have any jurisdiction within this realm of England. That "gospel light first dawned from Boleyn's eyes" might be a paradox. It was, however, a paradox which contained a truth, and it was by no means disagreeable to find that a popular king was not a mere monster of iniquity. If Henry had been what Catholic historians represented him, the mob would have pulled his palace about his ears. The public bought the book, and read it; for the style, though very unlike Macaulay's, was quite as easy to read. In 1860 appeared the two volumes dealing with Edward VI. And Mary, which complete the former half of this great book. After the brief and disturbed period of Edward's minority and Somerset's Protectorate, the country enjoyed a true Catholic reign. Whatever may have been the religion of Henry, there could be no doubt about Mary's. Mary had only one use for Protestants, and that was to burn them. Among her first victims were Latimer and Ridley, two bright ornaments of Christian faith and practice, who committed the deadly sin of believing that it was against the truth of Christ's natural body to be in heaven and earth at the same time. To them soon succeeded Cranmer, the father of the English liturgy, not a man of unblemished character, but incomparably superior to Gardiner, to Bonner, or to Pole. For Cranmer Froude had a peculiar affection, and his account of the Archbishop's martyrdom is unsurpa.s.sed by any other pa.s.sage in the History. I need make no apology for quoting the end of it; "So perished Cranmer. He was brought out with the eyes of his soul blinded to make sport for his enemies, and in his death he brought upon them a wider destruction than he had effected by his teaching while alive. Pole was appointed next day to the See of Canterbury; but in other respects the Court had overreached themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept the recantation, they would have left the Archbishop to die broken- hearted, pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn, and the Reformation would have been disgraced in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own b.l.o.o.d.y laws; and they gave him an opportunity of redeeming his fame, and of writing his name in the roll of martyrs. The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a single and peculiar trial. The Apostle, though forewarned, denied his Master on the first alarm of danger; yet that Master, who knew his nature in its strength and its infirmity, chose him for the rock on which He would build His Church."

It used to be said of Ernest Renan that he was toniours seminariste, and there is a flavour of the pulpit in these beautiful sentences. Beautiful indeed they are, and not more beautiful than true. The implacable Mary, whose ghastly epithet clings to her for all time, like the s.h.i.+rt of Nessus, found in Pole an apt and zealous pupil in persecution. Both are excellent specimens of their Church, because according to that Church they are absolutely blameless. Punctilious in the discharge of all religious duties, they were chaste, sober, frugal, and honest. They made long prayers. They t.i.thed mint, and anise, and c.u.mmin. They made clean the outside of the cup and platter. They firmly believed that they were pleasing the Deity they wors.h.i.+pped when they deluged England with blood. The spirit of the Marian martyrs is one of the n.o.blest tributes to the power of true religion that the annals of Christendom contain. Henry' s victims were few and conspicuous. Their crime, or alleged crime, was treason. Mary's were obscure, and numbered by the hundred. Many of them were artisans and mechanics, who, as Burghley afterwards said, knew no faith except that they were called upon to abjure. They went to the stake without a murmur, sustained against the terrors of demonology by their own English hearts, by the love of their friends, and by the grace of G.o.d. Tennyson, in his play of Queen Mary, has put into the mouth of Pole some highly edifying sentiments on the want of true faith which prompts persecution. Pole's example was very different from these precepts. For the wretched Mary there may be some excuse; she was perhaps not wholly sane. Her fixed idea, that if she killed Protestants enough Heaven would give her a son, was the conviction of a lunatic. Her own husband fled from her, and left her with no earthly consolation save the stake. But Pole was sane enough when he burnt better Christians than himself. The true story of Mary's reign deserved to be told as Froude could tell it. The tale has two sides, and is a warning which has been taken to heart. Mary's subjects could not rebel. Her Spanish husband had behind him the military strength of a great Power. But never again, except during the brief and disastrous period which led to the expulsion of the second James, has England endured a Catholic sovereign. Neither her rulers nor her laws have always been just to Catholics. To tolerate intolerance, though a truly Christian lesson, is hard to learn. Mary Tudor and Reginald Pole taught the English people once for all what the triumph of Catholicism meant. So long as they are not supreme, Catholics are the best of subjects, of citizens, of neighbours, of friends. There is only one country in Europe where they are supreme now, and that country is Spain. They might have been supreme in England for at least a century if it had not been for the daughter of Katharine of Aragon and the Legate of Julius III.

Froude had now completed the first part of his great History. The second part, the reign of Elizabeth, was reserved for future issue in separately numbered volumes. The death of Macaulay in December, 1859, left Froude the most famous of living English historians, and the ugly duckling of the brood had become the glory of the family. The reception of his first six volumes was a curious one. The general public read, and admired. The few critics who were competent to form an instructed and impartial opinion perceived that, while there were errors in detail, the story of the English Reformation, and of the Catholic reaction which followed it, had been for the first time thoroughly told. Many years afterwards Froude said to Tennyson that the most essential quality in an historian was imagination. This true and profound remark is peculiarly liable to be misunderstood. People who do not know what imagination means are apt to confound it with invention, although the latter quality is really the last resort of those who are dest.i.tute of the former. Froude was an ardent lover of the truth, and desired nothing so much as to tell it. But it must be the truth as perceived by him, not as it might appear to others.* His readers are expected, if not to see with his eyes, at least to look from his point of view. Honestly believing that the Reformation was a great and beneficent fact in the progress of mankind, he was incapable of treating it as a sinful rebellion against the authority of the Church. Holding Henry VIII., with all his faults, to have been the champion of the laity against the clergy, of spiritual and intellectual freedom against the Roman yoke, he could not represent him as a monster of wickedness, trampling on morality for his own selfish ends. Doing full justice to the conscientiousness of Mary Tudor, excusing her more than some think she ought to be excused, he depicted the heroes of her b.l.o.o.d.y reign not only in Latimer and Ridley, but in the scores and hundreds of lowlier persons who died for the faith of Christ.

- * "Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth or error, but that anything is true to a man which he troweth? and not rather, as the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our moral as well as our intellectual being?"-Newman's Grammar of a.s.sent, p. 311. -

Protestant as he was, however, Froude was an Englishman first and a Protestant afterwards. One might say of his history, as was said of the drama which Tennyson founded upon the fifth and sixth volumes, that the true heroine is the English people. Much of his popularity was due to his patriotism and his Protestantism. On the other hand he gave deep and lasting offence to High Churchmen, which they neither forgot nor forgave. They could not bear the spectacle of a Church established by statute, of the king in place of the Pope, of Cromwell and Cranmer justified, of More and Fisher condemned. While not unwilling to profit by Erastianism, they liked its origin kept out of sight. Bishops appointed by the Crown and sitting in the House of Lords, though awkward facts, were too familiar to be upsetting. The secular and Parliamentary origin of praemunire and conge d' elire were less notorious and more disagreeable subjects. They were indeed to be found in Hallam. But Hallam had not the popularity or the influence of Froude. Const.i.tutional histories are for the learned cla.s.ses. Froude wrote for men of the world. The consummate dexterity of his style was only observed by trained critics; its ease and grace were the unconscious delight of the humblest reader. Froude gave to the Protestant cause the same sort of distinction which Newman had given to the Oxford Movement. Newman's University sermons are neither learned nor profound. Yet the preacher's mastery of the English language in all its rich and manifold resources has, and must always have, an irresistible charm. The mantle of Newman had fallen on Froude, and Froude had also the indefatigable diligence of the born historian. None of his mistakes were due to carelessness. They proceeded rather from the mult.i.tude of the doc.u.ments he studied and the self-reliance which led him to dispense with all external aid. He had of course friendly reviewers, such as William Bodham Donne; afterwards Examiner of Plays, in Fraser, and Charles Kingsley in Macmillan. Kingsley, however, though Lord Palmerston made him Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, was not altogether the best ally for an historian. It was in defending Froude that Kingsley made his unfortunate attack upon Newman, which led to his own discomfiture in the first Preface to the Apologia. Froude was unable to support his champion's irrelevant and unlucky onslaught. Newman's casuistry was a fair subject for criticism; his personal integrity should have been above suspicion, and Kingsley's insinuations against it only recoiled upon himself. No one, as his History shows, could do ampler justice to individual Catholics than Froude, and his feelings for Newman were never altered, either by disagreement or by time.

The first part of the History had just been finished when a sudden bereavement altered the whole course of Froude's life. On the 21st of April, 1860, Mrs. Froude died. Her religious opinions had been very different from her husband's. She had always leant towards the Church of Rome, though after her marriage she did not conform to it. He was probably under Mrs. Froude's influence when he wrote his Essay on the Philosophy of Catholicism in 1851, reprinted in the first series of Short Studies, which does not strike one as at all characteristic of him, and is certainly quite different from his n.o.ble discourse on the Book of Job, published two years later. Mrs. Froude never cared for London, and had always lived in the country. After her death Froude took for the first time a London house, and settled himself with his children in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park.

Later in the same year died his publisher, John Parker the younger, of a painful and distressing illness, through which Froude nursed him with tender affection. The elder Parker kept on the business, and brought out the remaining volumes of Froude's History. His son had been editor of Fraser's Magazine, and in that position Froude succeeded him at the beginning of 1861. He thus found a regular occupation besides his History. Fraser had a high literary reputation, and among its regular contributors was John Skelton, writing under the name of "s.h.i.+rley," who became one of Froude's most intimate friends. In the Table Talk of s.h.i.+rley* are some interesting extracts from Froude's letters, as well as a very vivid description of Froude himself. On the 12th of January, when he was only just installed, Froude began a correspondence kept up for thirty years by a brief note about Thelatta, a political romance by Skelton, with an odd, mixed portrait of Canning and Disraeli, very pleasant to read, but now almost, I do not know why, neglected.

- * Blackwood, 1895. -

Froude is hardly just to it. "I have read Thalatta," he writes, "and now what shall I say? for it is so charming, and it might be so much more charming. There is no mistake about its value. The yacht scene made me groan over the recollections of days and occupations exactly the same. To wander round the world in a hundred tons schooner would be my highest realisation of human felicity." Even the name of the book must have appealed to Froude. For more than almost any other man of letters he loved the sea. Yachting was his pa.s.sion. He pursued it in youth despite of qualms, and in later life they disappeared. Const.i.tutionally fearless, and an excellent sailor, a voyage was to him the best of holidays, invigorating the body and refres.h.i.+ng the brain.

Froude was already at work on the reign of Elizabeth, and in March, 1861, he went to Spain for two months. This was the occasion of his earliest visit to Simancas, where he was allowed free access to the diplomatic correspondence and other records there collected and kept. The advantage to Froude of these doc.u.ments, especially the despatches from the Spanish Amba.s.sadors in London to the Government at Madrid, was enormous, and it is from them that the last volumes of the History derive their peculiar value. He used his opportunities to the utmost, and his bulky, voluminous transcripts may be seen at the British Museum. His plan was to take rooms at Valladolid, from which he drove to Simancas, a wretched little village, and worked for the day. The unpublished materials which he found at his disposal were such as scarcely any historian had ever enjoyed before.

A few months after his return to England, on the 12th of September, 1861, he married his second wife, Henrietta Warre. Miss Warre, who had been his first wife's intimate friend, was exactly suited to him, and their union was one of perfect happiness. So long as he was editor of Fraser, Froude felt it his duty to write pretty regularly for it, so that his hands were constantly full. But of course his main business for the next ten years was the continuation of his History, which involved frequent visits to Simancas, as well as many to the British Museum, the Record Office, and Hatfield House.

From the Marquess of Salisbury, father of the late Prime Minister, Froude received permission to search the Cecil papers at Hatfield, which, though less numerous than those in the Record Office, are invaluable to students of Elizabeth's reign. His investigations at Hatfield were begun in April, 1862, and led, among other consequences, to one of his most valued friends.h.i.+ps. With Lady Salisbury, afterwards Lady Derby, he kept up for more than thirty years a correspondence which only ended with his death. It was Froude who introduced Lady Salisbury to Carlyle, and she thoroughly appreciated the genius of both. Her intimate knowledge of politics was completed when Lord Derby sat in Disraeli's Cabinet. But she was always behind the scenes, and it was from her that Froude obtained most of his political information. Their earliest communications, however, referred to the Elizabethan part of the History, especially to the career and influence of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. A preliminary letter shows the thoroughness of Froude's methods. The date is the 5th of March, 1862.

"DEAR LADY SALISBURY,-If Lord Salisbury has not repented of his kind promise to me, I shall in a few weeks be in a condition to avail myself of it, and I write to ask you whether about the beginning of next month I may be permitted to examine the papers at Hatfield. I am unwilling to trouble Lord Salisbury more than necessary. I have therefore examined every other collection within my reach first, that I might know clearly what I wanted. Obliged as I am to confine myself for the present to the first ten years of Elizabeth's reign, there will not be much which I shall have to examine there, the great bulk of Lord Burleigh's papers for that time being in the Record Office-but if I can be allowed a few days' work, I believe I can turn them to good account. With my very best thanks for your own and Salisbury's goodness in this matter, I remain, faithfully yours,

"J. A. FROUDE."

A few days later he writes: "I have seen Stewart and looked through the catalogue. There appear to be about eight volumes which I wish to examine. The volumes which I marked as containing matter at present important to me are Vols. 2 and 3 on the war with France and Scotland from 1559 to 1563, Vols. 138, 152, 153, 154, 155 on the disputes relating to the succession to the English Crown, and the respective claims of the Queen of Scots, Lady Catherine Grey, Lord Darnley, and Laqy Margaret Lennox. I noted the volumes only. I did not take notice of the pages because as far as I could see the volumes appeared to be given up to special subjects, and I should wish therefore to read them through."

His growing admiration for Cecil appears in the following extracts:

"I could only do real justice to such a collection by being allowed to read through the whole of it volume by volume-and for such a large permission as that I fear it may be dangerous to ask. Lord Salisbury, however, whatever my faults may be, could find no one who has a more genuine admiration for his ancestor."

October 16th, 1864.-"I cannot say beforehand the papers which I wish to examine, as I cannot tell what the collection may contain. My object is to have everything which admits of being learnt about the period-especially what may throw light on Lord Burleigh's character. He, it is more and more clear to me, was the solitary author of Elizabeth's and England's greatness."

"I shall return from Simancas," he writes from Valladolid, "more a Cecil maniac than ever. In the Duke of Norfolk's conspiracy, the Queen seems to have fairly given up the reins to him. It is impossible to read the correspondence between Philip, Alva, the Pope, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Queen of Scots, the deliberate arrangements for Elizabeth's murder, without s.h.i.+vering to think how near a chance it was. Cecil was the one only man they feared, and the skill with which he dug mines below theirs, and pulled the strings of the whole of Europe against them, was truly splendid. Elizabeth had lost her head with it all, but she knew it and did not interfere. There are a great many letters of the Queen of Scots at Simancas, some of them of the deepest interest. She remains the same as I have always thought her-brilliant, cruel, ruthless, and perfectly unfeeling."

Although Froude's admiration for Elizabeth steadily diminished with the progress of his researches, even students of his History will be surprised by such a verdict as this:

"I am slowly drawing to the end of my long journey through the Records. By far the largest part of Burghley's papers is here [in the Record Office], and not at Hatfield. The private letters which pa.s.sed between him and Walsingham about Elizabeth have destroyed finally the prejudice that still clung to me that, notwithstanding her many faults, she was a woman of ability. Evidently in their opinion she had no ability at all worth calling by the name."

Two or three extracts will complete the part of this correspondence which deals with the composition of the History. "I have been incessantly busy in the Record Office since my return to London. The more completely I examine the MSS. elsewhere the better use I shall be able to make of yours. I have still two months of this kind before me, and my intention, if you did not yourself write to me first, was to ask you to let me go to Hatfield for a week or two about Easter."

"I am now sufficiently master of the story to be able to make very good (I daresay complete) use of the Hatfield papers in my present condition. I feel as if there were very few dark places left in Queen Elizabeth's proceedings anywhere. I substantially end, in a blaze of fireworks, with the Armada. The concentrated interest of the reign lies in the period now under my hands. It is all action, and I shall use my materials badly if I cannot make it as interesting as a novel."

Nothing was neglected by Froude which could throw light upon the splendid and ill.u.s.trious Queen who raised England from the depths of degradation to the height of renown. It was at the zenith of Elizabeth's career that Froude stopped. His original intention had been to continue till her death. But the ample scale on which he had planned his book was so much enlarged by his copious quotations from the ma.n.u.scripts at Simancas that by the time he reached his eleventh volume he subst.i.tuted for the death of Elizabeth on his t.i.tle-page the defeat of the Armada. With the year 1588, then, he closed his labours. Even the perverse critics who had a.s.sumed to treat the History of Henry VIII. as an anti-ecclesiastical pamphlet were compelled to show more respect for volumes which gave so much novel information to the world. Moreover Henry's daughter was a very different person from her father. Scandal about Queen Elizabeth had been chiefly confined to Roman Catholics, and few Englishmen had forgotten who made England the mistress of the seas. The old religion had a strong fascination for her, and every one knows how she interrupted Dean Nowell when he preached against images. She declined to be the head of the Church in the sense arrogated by Henry, and yet she would by no means admit the supremacy of the Pope. If she ever felt any inclination towards Rome, the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew checked it for ever. Gregory XIII. and Catherine de Medici were rulers to her taste. On the other hand she resisted the persecuting tendencies of her Bishops, and spared the life even of such a wretch as Bonner. It is possible that she believed in transubstantiation. It is certain that she objected to the marriage of the clergy, and showed scant courtesy to the wife of her own favourite Archbishop Parker. Nor would she suffer the Bishops, except as Peers, to meddle in affairs of State. A magnificent princess, every inch a queen, she could not forget that the English people had saved her life from the clutches of her sister, and it was for them, not for any Minister, courtier, or lover, that she really cared.

Froude was no idolater of Elizabeth, and he became more unfavourable to her as he proceeded. He dwells minutely upon all her intrigues, in which she was as petty as in great matters she was grand. For her rival, Mary Stuart, he had neither respect nor mercy. To her intellect indeed, which was quite on a par with Elizabeth's, he does full justice. But neither her beauty nor her wit, neither her scholars.h.i.+p nor her statesmans.h.i.+p, neither her pa.s.sion nor her courage, could blind him to her selfishness, her immorality, and the fact that she represented the Catholic cause. His account of her execution certainly lacks sentiment, and Mrs. Norton accused him of writing like a disappointed lover. His sympathies are with John Knox, and the Regent Murray, and Maitland of Lethington. But the man who believes that Mary was not concerned in the murder of her husband will believe anything, even that she did not reward the murderer of her brother, or that she would have spared Elizabeth if Elizabeth had been in her power. And at least Froude does not, like some more modern writers, degrade her to the level of a kitchen wench. Froude's Elizabeth was the subject of bitter, hostile, sometimes violent, criticism in The Sat.u.r.day Review, the property of an ardent High Churchman, Beresford Hope. In the next chapter I shall deal with these articles at more length. It is enough to say here that they were directed not merely at Froude's accuracy as an historian, but at his truthfulness as a man, suggesting that the mode in which he had manipulated authorities accessible to every one threw grave doubts upon his version of what he read at Simancas. Froude knew very well that he should make enemies. His belief that history had been cericalised, and required to be laicised, was regarded as peculiarly offensive in one who had been himself ordained.

Mary Stuart, moreover, had stalwart champions beyond the border who were neither clerical nor ecclesiastical. "I fear," Froude wrote on the 22nd of May, 1862, to his Scottish friend Skelton, who was himself much interested in the subject-"I fear my book will bring all your people about my ears. Mary Stuart, from my point of view, was something between Rachel and a pantheress."

The success of the History had been long since a.s.sured, and each successive pair of volumes met with a cordial welcome. Many people disagreed with Froude on many points. He expected disagreement, and did not mind it. But no one could fail to see the evidence of patient, thorough research which every chapter, almost every page, contains. Indeed, it might be said with justice, or at least with some plausibility, that the long and frequent extracts from the despatches of De Feria, de Quadra, de Silva, and Don Guereau, successively Amba.s.sadors from Philip to Elizabeth, water-log the book, and make it too like a series of extracts with explanatory comments. Of Froude's own style there could not be two opinions. His bitterest antagonists were forced to admit that it was the perfection of easy, graceful narrative, without the majestic splendour of Gibbon, but also without the mechanical hardness of Macaulay. Froude did not stop deliberately, as other historians have stopped, to paint pictures or draw portraits, and there are few writers from whom it is more difficult to make typical or characteristic extracts. Yet, as I have already quoted from his account of Cranmer's execution, it may not be inappropriate that I should cite some of the thoughts suggested to him by the death of Knox. Morton's epitaph is well known.

"There lies one," said the Earl over the coffin, "who never feared the face of mortal man." "Morton," says Froude, "spoke only of what he knew; the full measure of Knox's greatness neither he nor any man could then estimate. It is as we look back over that stormy time, and weigh the actors in it one against the other, that he stands out in his full proportions. No grander figure can be found, in the entire history of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox. Cromwell and Burghley rank beside him for the work which they effected, but, as politicians and statesmen, they had to labour with instruments which soiled their hands in touching them. In purity, in uprightness, in courage, truth and stainless honour, the Regent and Latimer were perhaps his equals; but Murray was intellectually far below him and the sphere of Latimer's influence was on a smaller scale. The time has come when English history may do justice to one but for whom the Reformation would have been overthrown among ourselves; for the spirit which Knox created saved Scotland; and if Scotland had been Catholic again, neither the wisdom of Elizabeth's Ministers, nor the teaching of her Bishops, nor her own chicaneries, would have preserved England from revolution. His was the voice that taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of G.o.d with the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was the one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was who had raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superst.i.tious and fanatical, but who nevertheless were men whom neither king, n.o.ble, nor priest could force again to submit to tyranny. And his reward has been the ingrat.i.tude of those who should have done most honour to his memory."

The spirit of this fine pa.s.sage may be due to the great Scotsman with whom Froude's name will always be inseparably a.s.sociated. But Froude knew the subject as Carlyle did not pretend to know it, and his verdict is as authoritative as it is just. It is knowledge, even more than brilliancy, that these twelve volumes evince. Froude had mastered the sixteenth century as Macaulay mastered the seventeenth, with the same minute, patient industry. When he came to write he wrote with such apparent facility that those who did not know the meaning of historical research thought him shallow and superficial.

The period during which Froude was studying the reign of Elizabeth must be p.r.o.nounced the happiest of his life. He was a born historian, and loved research. He had opportunities of acquiring knowledge opened to no one before, and it concerned those events which above all others attracted him. His second wife was the most sympathetic of companions, thoroughly understanding all his moods. She was fond of society, and induced him to frequent it. Froude was disinclined to go out in the evening, and would, if he had been left to himself, have stayed at home. He wrote to Lady Salisbury: "I must trust to your kindness to make allowance for my old-fas.h.i.+oned ways. I am so much engaged in the week that I give my Sunday evenings to my children, and never go out." But when he was in company he talked better than almost any one else, and he had a magnetic power of fascination which men as well as women often found quite irresistible. Living in London, he saw people of all sorts, and the puritan sternness which lay at the root of his character was concealed by the cynical humour which gave zest to his conversation. He had not forgotten his native county, and in 1863 he took a house at Salcombe on the southern coast of Devons.h.i.+re. Ringrone, which he rented from Lord Kingsale, is a beautiful spot, now a hotel, then remote from railways, and an ideal refuge for a student. "We have a sea like the Mediterranean," he tells Skelton, "and estuaries beautiful as Loch Fyne, the green water was.h.i.+ng our garden wall, and boats and mackerel." Froude worked there, however, besides yachting, fis.h.i.+ng, and shooting.

In 1864, for instance, he "floundered all the summer among the extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics-the most d.a.m.nable set of pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark." His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of the finest in England. Froude loved Devons.h.i.+re folk, and enjoyed talking to them in their own dialect, or smoking with them on the sh.o.r.e. He was particularly fond of the indignant expostulation of a poor woman whose husband had been injured by his own chopper, and obliged in consequence to keep his bed. If, she said, it had been "a visitation of Providence, or the like of that there," he would have borne it patiently. "But to come upon a man in the wood-house" was not in the fitness of things. Froude's favourite places of wors.h.i.+p in London were Westminster Abbey during Dean Stanley's time, and afterwards the Temple Church, as may be gathered from his Short Study on the Templars. In Devons.h.i.+re he frequented an old-fas.h.i.+oned church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard. "Who is the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the King of glory."

As an editor Froude was tolerant and catholic. "On controverted points," he said, "I approve myself of the practice of the Reformation. When St. Paul's Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be pulled up before the same audience for what they might say." His own literary judgments were rather conventional. The mixture of cla.s.ses in Clough's Bothie disturbed him. The genius of Matthew Arnold he had recognised at once, but then Arnold was a cla.s.sical, academic poet. About Tennyson he agreed with the rest of the world, while Tennyson, who was a personal friend, paid him the great compliment of taking from him the subject of a poem and the material of a play. His prejudice against Browning's style, much as he liked Browning himself, was hard to overcome, and on this point he had a serious difference with his friend Skelton. "Browning's verse!" he exclaims. "With intellect, thought, power, grace, all the charms in detail which poetry should have, it rings after all like a bell of lead." This was in 1863, when Browning had published Men and Women, and Dramatic Lyrics. However, he admitted Skelton's article on the other side, and added, with magnificent candour, that "to this generation Browning's poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare's Sonnets were to the last century." The most fervent Browningite could have said no more than that. To Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads Froude was conspicuously fair. There was much in them which offended his Puritanism, but he was disgusted with the virulence of the critics, and he allowed Skelton to write in Fraser a qualified apology.

"The Sat.u.r.day Review temperament," he wrote, "is ten thousand thousand times more d.a.m.nable than the worst of Swinburne's skits. Modern respectability is so utterly without G.o.d, faith, heart; it shows so singular an ingenuity in and injuring everything that is n.o.ble and good, and so systematic a preference for what is mean and paltry, that I am not surprised at a young fellow das.h.i.+ng his heels into the face of it .... When there is any kind of true genius, we have no right to drive it mad. We must deal with it wisely, justly, fairly."*

- * Table Talk of s.h.i.+rley, p. 137. -

Froude was an excellent editor; appreciative, discriminating, and alert. He prided himself on Carlyle's approval, though perhaps Carlyle was not the best judge of such things. His energy was multifarious. Besides his History and his magazine, he found time for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a good audience. His discourse at the Royal Inst.i.tution in February, 1864, on "The Science of History," for which he was "called an atheist," is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really scientific historian. According to Buckle, the history of mankind was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the past that made the impossibility of predicting the future. Great men were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle more erratic in their behaviour. Political economy was history in little, ill.u.s.trating the regularity of human, like all other natural, forces. But can we predict historical events, as we can predict an eclipse? That is Froude's answer to Buckle, in the form of a question.

"Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, b.l.o.o.d.y as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made the greatest progress are the arts of destruction." It is difficult to see the atheism in all this, but the common sense is plain enough. Froude belonged to the school of literary historians, such as were Thucydides and Tacitus, Gibbon and Finlay, not to the school of Buckle, or, as we should now say, of Professor Bury.

In 1865 Froude removed from Clifton Place, Hyde Park, to Onslow Gardens in South Kensington, where he lived for the next quarter of a century. In 1868 the students of St. Andrews chose him to be Lord Rector of the University, and on the 23rd of March, 1869, he delivered his Inaugural Address on Education, which compared the plain living and high thinking of the Scottish Universities with the expensive and luxurious idleness that he remembered at Oxford. Froude was delighted with the compliment the students had paid him, and they were equally charmed with their Rector. In fact, his visit to St. Andrews produced in 1869 a suggestion that he should become the Parliamentary representative of that University and of Edinburgh. But the injustice of the law as it then stood disqualified him as a candidate. His deacon's orders, the shadowy remnant of a mistaken choice, stood in his way. Next year, in 1870, Bouverie's Act pa.s.sed, and Froude was one of the first to take advantage of it by becoming again, what he had really never ceased to be, a layman. As he did not enter the House of Commons, it is idle to speculate on what might have been his political career. Probably it would have been undistinguished. He was not a good speaker, and he was a bad party man. His butler, who had been long with him, and knew him well, was once asked by a canva.s.sing agent what his master's politics were. "Well," he said reflectively, "when the Liberals are in, Mr. Froude is sometimes a Conservative. When the Conservatives are in, Mr. Froude is always a Liberal." His own master, Carlyle, had been in early life an ardent reformer, and had hoped great things from the Act of 1832. Perhaps he did not know very clearly what he expected. At any rate he was disappointed, and, though he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Peel alter the abolition of the Corn Laws, he regarded the Reform Act of 1867 with indignant disgust.

Froude had a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli. Gladstone he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to understand. He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic party in the Church of England, and Gladstone's financial genius was out of his line. The Liberal Government of 1868 was in his opinion criminally indifferent to the Colonies. An earnest advocate of Federation, he did not see that the best way of retaining colonial loyalty was to preserve colonial independence intact. Nevertheless Froude was a pioneer of the modern movement, still in progress, for a closer union with the scattered parts of the British Empire. He feared that the Colonies would go if some effort were not made to retain them, and he turned over in his mind the various means of building up a federal system. Although Canadian Federation was emphatically Canadian in its origin, and had been adopted in principle by Cardwell during the Government of Lord Russell, it was Lord Carnarvon who carried it out, and he had no warmer supporter than Froude.

Of Froude's favourite recreations at this time the best account is to be found in his two Short Studies on A Fortnight in Kerry. From 1868 to 1870 he rented from Lord Lansdowne a place called Derreen, thirty-six miles from Killarney, and seventeen from Kenmare, where he spent the best part of the summer and autumn. If Froude did not altogether understand the Irish people, at least the Irish Catholics, and had no sympathy with their political aspirations, he loved their humour, and the scenery of "the most beautiful island in the world" had been familiar to him from his early manhood. In one of his youthful rambles he had been struck down by small-pox, and nursed with a devotion which he never forgot. Yet between him and the Celt, as between him and the Catholic, there was a mysterious, impa.s.sable barrier. They had not the same fundamental ideas of right and wrong. They did not in very truth wors.h.i.+p the same G.o.d. But of Froude and the Irish I shall have to speak more at length hereafter. In Kerry he enjoyed himself, while at the same time he finished his History of England, and his description of the country is enchanting.

"A glance out of the window in the morning showed that I had not overrated the general charm of the situation. The colours were unlike those of any mountain scenery to which I was accustomed elsewhere. The temperature is many degrees higher than that of the Scotch highlands. The Gulf Stream impinges full upon the mouths of its long bays. Every tide carries the flood of warm water forty miles inland, and the vegetation consequently is rarely or never checked by frost even two thousand feet above the sea-level. Thus the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of gra.s.s as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and precipices to the very summits. The rock, chiefly old red sandstone, is purple. The heather, of which there are enormous ma.s.ses, is in many places waist deep." Yachting and fis.h.i.+ng, fis.h.i.+ng and yachting, were the staple amus.e.m.e.nts at Derreen. Nothing was more characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air. Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved. "I always consider," he said, "that the proudest moment of my life was, when sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodc.o.c.ks." For luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own words. "I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my five brace of grouse. I see no amus.e.m.e.nt in dawdling over a lowland moor where the packs are as thick as chickens in a poultry-yard. I like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered covers, when I know not what may rise-a woodc.o.c.k, an odd pheasant, a snipe in the out-lying willow-bed, and perhaps a mallard or a teal. A hare or two falls in agreeably when the mistress of the house takes an interest in the bag. I detest battues and hot corners, and slaughter for slaughter's sake. I wish every tenant in England had his share in amus.e.m.e.nts which in moderation are good for us all, and was allowed to shoot such birds or beasts as were bred on his own farm, any clause in his lease to the contrary notwithstanding." Considering that this pa.s.sage was written ten years before the Ground Game Act, it must be admitted that the sentiment is remarkably liberal. The chief interest of these papers,* however, is not political, but personal. They show what Froude's natural tastes were, the tastes of a sportsman and a country gentleman. He had long outgrown the weakness of his boyhood, and his physical health was robust. With a firm foot and a strong head he walked freely over cliffs where a false step would have meant a fall of a thousand feet. No man of letters was ever more devoted to exercise and sport. Though subject, like most men, and all editors, to fits of despondency, he had a sound mind in a healthy frame, and his pessimism was purely theoretical.

- * Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 217-308. -

Froude's History, the great work of his life, was completed in 1870. He deliberately chose, after the twelve volumes, to leave Elizabeth at the height of her power, mistress of the seas, with Spain crushed at her feet. As he says himself, in the opening paragraph of his own Conclusion, "Chess-players, when they have brought their game to a point at which the result can be foreseen with certainty, regard their contest as ended, and sweep the pieces from the board." Froude had accomplished his purpose. He had rewritten the story of the Reformation. He had proved that the Church of England, though in a sense it dated from St. Austin of Canterbury, became under Henry VIII. a self-contained inst.i.tution, independent of Rome and subject to the supremacy of the Crown.

Elizabeth altered the form of words in which her father had expressed his ecclesiastical authority; but the substance was in both cases the same. The sovereign was everything. The Bishop of Rome was nothing. There has never been in the Church of England since the divorce of Katharine any power to make a Bishop without the authority of the Crown, or to change a doctrine without the authority of Parliament, nor has any layman been legally subject to temporal punishment by the ecclesiastical courts. Convocation cannot touch an article or a formulary. King, Lords, and Commons can make new formularies or abolish the old. The laity owe no allegiance to the Canons, and in every theological suit the final appeal is to the King in Council, now the Judicial Committee. Since the accession of Elizabeth divine service has been performed in English, and the English Bible has been open to every one who can read. Yet there are people who talk as if the Reformation meant nothing, was nothing, never occurred at all. This theory, like the shallow sentimentalism which made an innocent saint and martyr of Mary Stuart, has never recovered from the crus.h.i.+ng onslaught of Froude.

Mr. Swinburne in the Encyclopaedia Britannica reduces the latter theory to an absurdity, by demonstrating that if Mary was innocent she was a fool. In his defence of Elizabeth Froude stops short of many admirers. He was disgusted by her feminine weakness for masculine flattery; he dwells with almost tedious minuteness upon her smallest intrigues; he exposes her parsimonious ingrat.i.tude to her dauntless and unrivalled seamen. Yet for all that he brings out the vital difference between her and Mary Tudor, between the Protestant and Catholic systems of government. Elizabeth boasted, and boasted truly, that she did not persecute opinion. If people were good citizens and loyal subjects, it was all the same to her whether they went to church or to ma.s.s. Had it been possible to adopt and apply in the sixteenth century the modern doctrine of contemptuous indifference to sectarian quarrels, there was not one of her subjects more capable of appreciating and acting upon it than the great Queen herself. But in that case she would have estranged her friends without conciliating her opponents. She would have forfeited her throne and her life. Pius V. had not merely excommunicated her, which was a barren and ineffective threat, a telum imbelle sine ictu; he had also purported to depose her as a heretic, and to release her subjects from the duty of allegiance. Another Vicar of Christ, Gregory XIII., went farther. He intimated, not obscurely, that whosoever removed such a monster from the world would be doing G.o.d's service. This at least was no idle menace. Those great leaders of Protestantism in Europe, Coligny, Murray, William the Silent, were successively murdered within a few years. That was, as Fra Paolo said when he saw the dagger (stilus) which had wounded him, the style (stylus) of the Roman Court. It is all very well to say that Gregory was a blasphemous, murderous old bigot, and might have been left to the G.o.d of justice and mercy, who would deal with him in His own good time. Before that time came, Elizabeth might have been in her grave, Mary Stuart might have been on the English throne, and the liberties of England might have been as the liberties of Spain.

Elizabeth never felt personal fear. But she was not a private individual. She was an English sovereign, and the keynote of all her subtle, intricate, tortuous policy was the resolute determination, from which she never flinched, that England should be independent, spiritually as well as politically independent, of a foreign yoke. Her connection with the Protestants was political, not theological, for doctrinally she was farther from Geneva than from Rome. Her own Bishops she despised, not unjustly, as time-servers, calling them "doctors," not prelates. Although she did not really believe that any human person, or any human formula, was required between the Almighty and His creatures, she preferred the ma.s.s and the breviary to the Book of Common Prayer. The Inquisition was the one part of the Catholic system which she really abhorred. For the first twenty years of her reign ma.s.s was celebrated in private houses with impunity, though to celebrate it was against the law. No part of her policy is more odious to modern notions of tolerance and enlightenment than prohibition of the ma.s.s. Nothing shows more clearly the importance of understanding the mental atmosphere of a past age before we attempt to judge those who lived in it. Even Oliver Cromwell, fifty years after Elizabeth's death, declared that he would not tolerate the ma.s.s, and in general principles of religious freedom he was far ahead of his age. Cromwell no doubt, unlike Elizabeth, was a Protestant in the religious sense. But that was not his reason. The ma.s.s to him, and still more to Elizabeth, was a definite symbol of political disaffection. It was a rallying point for those who held that a heretical sovereign had no right to reign, and might lawfully be deposed, if not worse. Between the Catholics of our day and the Catholics of Elizabeth's time there is a great gulf fixed. What has fixed it is a question too complex to be discussed in this place. Catholics still revere the memory of Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who gave his blessing to Campian and Parsons on their way to stir up rebellion in England, as well as in Ireland, and to a.s.sa.s.sinate Elizabeth if opportunity should serve. G.o.d said, "Thou shall do no murder." The Pope, however, thought that G.o.d had spoken too broadly, and that some qualification was required. The sixth commandment could not have been intended for the protection of heretics; and the Jesuits, if they did not inspire, at least believed him. Campian is regarded by thousands of good men and women, who would not hurt a fly, as a martyr to the faith, and to the faith as he conceived it he was a martyr. He endured torture and death without flinching rather than acknowledge that Elizabeth was lawful sovereign over the whole English realm. His courage was splendid. There never, for the matter of that, was a braver man than Guy Fawkes. But when Campian pretended that his mission to England was purely religious he was tampering with words in order to deceive. To him the removal of Elizabeth would have been a religious act. The Queen did all she could to make him save his life by recantation, even applying the cruel and lawless machinery of the rack. If his errand had been merely to preach what he regarded as Catholic truth, she would have let him go, as she checked the persecuting tendencies of her Bishops over and over again. But it was as much her duty to defend England from the invasion of the Jesuits as to defend her from the invasion of the Spanish Armada. Both indeed were parts of one and the same enterprise, the forcible reduction of England to dependence upon the Catholic powers. Although in G.o.d's good providence it was foiled, it very nearly succeeded; and if Elizabeth had not removed Campian, Campian might, as Babington certainly would, have remove her.

The Pope had been directly concerned in the ma.s.sacre of St. Bartholomew, and his great ally, Philip II., is said to have laughed for the first time when he heard of it. More than a hundred years afterwards the pious Bossuet thanked G.o.d for the frightful slaughter of the Huguenots which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. While Mary Tudor burnt poor and humble persons who could be no possible danger to the State because they would not renounce the only form of Christian faith they had ever known, Elizabeth executed for treason powerful and influential men sent by the Pope to kill her. When, after many long years, she reluctantly consented to Mary Stuart's death on the scaffold, Mary had been implicated in a plot to take her life and succeed her as queen. Mary would have made much shorter work of her. If that is called persecution, the word ceases to have any meaning.

Froude quotes with approval, as well he might, the words of Campian's admiring biographer Richard Simpson, himself a Catholic, a most learned and accomplished man. "The eternal truths of Catholicism were made the vehicle for opinions about the authority of the Holy See which could not be held by Englishmen loyal to the Government; and true patriotism united to a false religion overcame the true religion wedded to opinions that were unpatriotic in regard to the liberties of Englishmen, and treasonable to the English Government." In those days there was only one kind of English Government possible; the Government of Elizabeth, Burghley, and Walsingham. Parliamentary Government did not exist. Even the right of free speech in the House of Commons was never recognised by the Queen. If the English Government had fallen, England would have been at the mercy of a Papal legate. Protestantism was synonymous with patriotism, and good Catholics could not be good Englishmen while there was a heretical sovereign on the throne. After the Armada things were different. Spain was crushed. Sixtus V. was not a man to waste money, which he loved, in support of a losing cause. What Froude wrote to establish, and succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng, was that between 1529 and 1588 the Reformation saved England from the tyranny of Rome and the proud foot of a Spanish conqueror.