The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

CHAPTER III

LIBERTY

Froude's position was now, from a worldly point of view, deplorable. For the antagonism of High Churchmen he was of course prepared. "Never mind," he wrote to Clough of The Nemesis, "if the Puseyites hate it; they must fear it, and it will work in the mind they have made sick." But he was also assailed in the Protestant press as an awful example of what the Oxford Movement might engender. His book was denounced on all sides, even by freethinkers, who regarded it as a reproach to their cause. The professors of University College, London, had appointed him to a mastership at Hobart Town in Australia, for which he applied the year before in the hope that change of scene might help to re-settle his mind. On reading the attacks in the newspapers they pusillanimously asked him to withdraw, and he withdrew. A letter to Clough, dated the 6th of March, 1849, explains his intellectual and material position at this time in a vivid and striking manner.

"I admire Matt. to a very great extent, only I don't see what business he has to parade his calmness, and lecture us on resignation, when he has never known what a storm is, and doesn't know what to resign himself to. I think he only knows the shady side of nature out of books. Still I think his versifying, and generally his aesthetic power is quite wonderful …. On the whole he shapes better than you, I think, but you have marble to cut out, and he has only clay …. Do you think that if the Council do ask me to give up I might fairly ask Lord Brougham as their President to get me helped instead to ever so poor an honest living in the Colonies? I can't turn hack writer, and I must have something fixed to do. Congreve is down-hearted about Oxford: not so I. I quite look to coming back in a very few years."

The Archdeacon, conceiving that the best remedy for free thought was short commons, stopped his son's allowance. Froude would have been alone in the world, if the brave and generous Kingsley had not come to his assistance. Like a true Christian, he invited Froude to his house, and made him at home there. To appreciate the magnanimity of this offer we must consider that Kinglsey was himself suspected of being a heretic, and that his prominent association with Froude brought him letters of remonstrance by every post. He said nothing about them, and Froude, in perfect ignorance of what he was inflicting upon his host, stayed two months with him at Ilfracombe and Lynmouth. Yet Kingsley did not, and could not, agree with Froude. He was a resolved, serious Christian, and never dreamt of giving up his ministry. He did not in the least agree with Froude, who made no impression upon him in argument. He acted from kindness, and respect for integrity.

Froude, however, could not stay permanently with the Kingsleys. His father would have nothing to do with him, and in his son's opinion was right to leave him with the consequences of his own errors. But the outcry against him had been so violent and excessive as to provoke a reaction. Froude might be an "infidel," he was not a criminal, and in resigning his Fellowship he had shown more honesty than prudence. His position excited the sympathy of influential persons. Crabb Robinson, though an entire stranger to him, wrote a public protest against Froude's treatment. Other men, not less distinguished, went farther. Chevalier Bunsen, the Prussian Minister, Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, and others whose names he never knew, subscribed a considerable sum of money for maintaining the unpopular writer at a German university while he made a serious study of theological science. But he had had enough of theology, and the munificent offer was declined, though Bunsen harangued him enthusiastically for five hours in Carlton Gardens on the exquisite adaptation of Evangelical doctrines to the human soul, until Froude began to suspect that they must have originated in the soul itself.

At this time a greater change than the loss of his Fellowship came upon Froude. While staying with the Kingsleys at Ilfracombe, he met Mrs. Kingsley's sister, Charlotte Grenfell, the Argemone of Yeast, a lady of somewhat wilful, yet most brilliant spirit, with a small fortune of her own. Miss Grenfell had joined the Church of Rome two years before, and at that time thought of entering a convent. This idea was extremely distasteful to her sister and her sister's husband. Their favourite remedy for feminine caprice was marriage, and they soon had the satisfaction of seeing Miss Grenfell become Mrs. Froude. There were some difficulties in the way, for Froude's prospects were by no means assured, and Mrs. Kingsley felt occasional scruples. But Froude had confidence in himself, and when his mind was made up he would not look back.

"You remember," he wrote to Mrs. Kingsley, in 1849, "I warned you that I intended to take my own way in life, doing (as I always have done) in all important matters just what I should think good, at whatever risk of consequences, and taking no other person's opinion when it crossed with my own. Now in this matter I feel certain that the way to save Charlotte most pain is to shorten the struggle, and that will be best done by being short, peremptory, and decided in allowing no dictation and no interference …. Charlotte herself is really magnificent. Every letter shows me larger nobleness of heart. You cannot go back now, Mrs. Kingsley."

Mrs. Kingsley did not go back, and Froude had his way. Before the wedding, however, another and a novel experience awaited him. His misfortunes aroused the interest of a rich manufacturer at Manchester, Mr. Darbishire, who offered him a resident tutorship, and would have taken him into his own firm, even, as it would seem, into his own family, if he had desired to become a man of business, and to live in a smoky town. But Froude was engaged to be married, and had a passionate love of the country. His keen, clear, rapid intelligence would probably have served him well in commercial affairs when once he had learnt to understand them. He was reserved for a very different destiny, and he gratefully declined Mr. Darbishire's offer. Nevertheless, his stay at Manchester as private tutor had some share in his mental development. He made acquaintance with interesting persons, such as Harriet Martineau, Geraldine Jewsbury, Mrs. Gaskell, and William Edward Forster, then known as a young Quaker who had devoted himself, in the true Quaker spirit of self-sacrifice, to relieving the sufferers from the Irish famine. Besides Manchester friends, Froude imbibed Manchester principles. He had been half inclined to sympathise with the socialism of Louis Blanc and other French revolutionists. Manchester cured him. He adopted the creed of individualism, private enterprise, no interference by Government, and free trade. In these matters he did not, at that time, go with Carlyle, as in ecclesiastical matters he had not gone with Newman. His mind was intensely practical, though in personal questions of self-interest he was careless, and even indifferent. Henceforth he abandoned speculation, as well philosophical as theological, and reverted to the historical studies of his youth. Philosophy at Oxford in those days meant Plato, Aristotle, and Bishop Butler. Froude was a good Greek scholar, and he had the true Oxford reverence for Butler. But he had not gone deeper into philosophy than his examinations and his pupils required. He liked positive results, and metaphysicians always suggested to him the movements of a squirrel in a cage.

The alternative to business was literature. Biographies of literary men, said Carlyle, are the most wretched documents in human history, except the Newgate Calendar. But Carlyle said many things he did not believe, and this was probably one of them. The truth is, that the literary profession, like the commercial, requires some little capital with which to set out, and Froude received this with his wife. Besides it he had brilliant talents, unflagging industry, and powers of writing such as have seldom been given to any of the sons of men. While at Manchester he composed The Cat's Pilgrimage, the earliest of his Short Studies in date. The moral of this fanciful fable is very like the moral of Candide.

The discontented cat, tired of her monotonously comfortable place on the hearthrug, goes out into the world, and gets nothing more than experience for her pains. She finds the other animals occupied with their own concerns, and enjoying life because they do not go beyond them. Not a very elevating paper, perhaps, but better than The Nemesis of Faith, and Froude's last word on the subjects that had tormented his youth.

He recoiled from materialism, finding that it offered no explanation of the universe. Faith in God he had never entirely lost, and on that he founded his henceforth unshaken belief in the providential government of the world. Whatever might be the origin of the Christian religion, it furnished the best guide of life; and spiritual truth, as Bunsen said, was independent of history. He had no sort of sympathy with those who rejected belief in Christianity altogether, still less with those who abandoned Theism. Although he could not be a minister of the Church, he was content to be a member, understanding the Church to be what he was brought up to think it, the national organ of religion, a Protestant, evangelical establishment under the authority of the law and the supremacy of the Crown.

Froude returned to Manchester immediately after his marriage, but his wife did not like the place nor the people. They looked about for a country home, and were fortunate enough to find the most enchanting spot in North Wales. Plas Gwynant, the shining place, stands on a rising ground surrounded by woods, at the foot of Snowdon, between Capel Curig and Beddgelert. Beyond the lawn and meadow is Dinas Lake. A cherry orchard stood close to the house door, and a torrent poured through a rocky ravine in the grounds, falling into a pool below. A mile up the valley was the glittering lake, Lyn Gwynant, with a boat and plenty of fishing. Good shooting was also within reach.

To this ideal home Froude came with his wife in the summer of 1850. Here began a new life of cloudless happiness and perfect peace. His spiritual difficulties fell away from him, and he found that the Church in which he had been born was comprehensive enough for him, as for others. He was not called upon to solve problems which had baffled the subtlest intellects, and would baffle them till the end of time. Religion could be made practical, and not until its practical lessons had been exhausted was it necessary to go farther afield. "Do the duty that lies nearest you," said Goethe, who knew art and science, literature and life, as few men have known them. Froude was never idle, and never at a loss for amusement. Although he wrote regularly, and his love of reading was a passion, he had the keenest enjoyment of sport and expeditions, of country air and sights and sounds, of natural beauty and physical exercise. It was impossible to be dull in his company, for he was the prince of conversers, drawing out as much as he gave. No wonder that there were numerous visitors at Plas Gwynant. He was the best and warmest of friends. In London he would always lay aside his work for the day to entertain one of his contemporaries at Oxford, and at Plas Gwynant they found a hospitable welcome. He would fish with them, or shoot with them, or boat with them, or walk with them, discussing every subject under heaven. Perhaps the most valued of his guests was Clough, who had then written most of his poetry, and projected new enterprises, not knowing how short his life would be.

Besides Clough, Matthew Arnold came to Plas Gwynant, and Charles
Kingsley, and John Conington, the Oxford Professor of Latin, and Max
Muller, the great philologist. A letter to Max Muller, dated the
25th of June, 1851, gives a pleasant picture of existence there.

"I shall be so glad to see you in July. Come and stay as long as work will let you, and you can endure our hospitality. We are poor, and so are not living at a high rate. I can't give you any wine, because I haven't a drop in the house, and you must bring your own cigars, as I am come down to pipes. But to set against that, you shall have the best dinner in Wales every day—fresh trout, Welsh mutton, as much bitter ale as you can drink; a bedroom and a little sitting-room joining it all for your own self, and the most beautiful look-out from the window that I have ever seen. You may vary your retirement. You may change your rooms for the flower- garden, which is an island in the river, or for the edge of the waterfall, the music of which will every night lull you to sleep. Last of all, you will have the society of myself, and of my wife, and, what ought to weigh with you too, you will give us the great pleasure of yours."

Clough neither fished, nor shot, nor boated, but as a walking companion there was no one, in Froude's opinion, to be put above him. For fishing he gave pre-eminence to Kingsley, and together they carried up their coracles to waters higher than ordinary boats could reach. Kingsley was ardent in all forms of sport, and an enthusiast for Maurician theology, holding, as he said, that it had pleased God to show him and Maurice things which He had concealed from Carlyle. He had concealed them also from Froude, who regarded Carlyle as his teacher, feeling that he owed him his emancipation from clerical bonds.

Froude and Kingsley did not agree either in theology or in politics. "I meant to say," Froude wrote to his wife's brother-in-law in 1851, "that the philosophical necessity of the Incarnation as a fact must have been as cogent to the earliest thinkers as to ourselves. If we may say it must have been, they might say so. And they might, and indeed must, have concluded, each at their several date, that the highest historical person known to them must have been the Incarnate God; so that unless the Incarnation was the first fact in human history, there must have been a time when they would have used the argument and it would have led them wrong."

Concerning Kingsley's Socialism, especially as shown in Hypatia, Froude was cold and critical. "It is by no means as yet clear to me," he wrote about this time, "that all good people are Socialists, and that therefore whoever sticks to the old thing is a bad fellow. Whatever is has no end of claims on us. I have no doubt that we could not get on without the devil. If it had not been so, he would not have been. The ideas must be content to fight a long time before they assimilate all the wholesome flesh in the universe, and we cannot leave what works somehow for what only promises to work, and has yet by no means largely realised that promise. I consider it a bad sign in the thinkers among the Christian Socialists if they set to cursing those who don't agree with them. The multitudes must, but the thinkers should not. I cannot believe that if Clement of Alexandria had been asked whether he candidly believed Tacitus was damned because he was a heathen he would have said 'Yes.' Indeed, on indifferent matters (supposing he had been alive in Tacitus's time), I don't think he would have minded writing a leader in the Acta Diurna, even though Tacitus followed on the other side!"

Oxford, and its old clothes, Froude had cast behind him. He had never taken priest's orders, and the clerical disabilities imposed upon him were not only cruel, but ridiculous. Shut out from the law, he turned to literature, and became a regular reviewer. There was not so much reviewing then as there is now, but it was better paid. His services were soon in great request, for he wrote an incomparable style.

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 pass 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 classics, 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 multitude 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 asserted 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 entitled 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 noble 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 massacred 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 God. A French privateer, Dominique de Gourges, whose name deserves to be held in honour and remembrance, sailed from Rochelle, 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 shores 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 documents in Strype and other chroniclers. Why, he asked himself should Henry, this bloody and ferocious tyrant, have been so popular in his own lifetime? Parliament, judges, juries, all the articulate classes 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 documents 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 assistance 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 pronounced 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 passage would be confidently assigned 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 Middlesex, and three other juries, assented 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 passing 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 gods 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, God 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.