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.
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 associates 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