["For they are not of today or yesterday, but these things live for ever, but no one knows from whence they appear." Sophocles, Antigone, 456.]
Before Abraham was they were, and it is impossible to imagine a time when they will have ceased to be.
— * Lectures on the Council of Trent, p. 1. —
Froude was an Erastian, holding that the Church should be subordinate to the State. True religion is incompatible with persecution. But true religion is rare, and the best modern security against the persecutor is the secular power. Mr. Spurgeon once excited great applause from members of his Church by declaring that the Baptists had never persecuted. When the cheers had subsided he explained that it was because they had never had a chance. Froude was convinced that ecclesiastics could not be trusted, and that they would oppress the laity unless the laity muzzled them. He held that the reformers had been calumniated, that their services were in danger of being forgotten, and that the modern attempt to ignore the Reformation was not only unhistorical, but disingenuous. He wrote partly to rehabilitate them, and partly to prove that Henry VIII. had conferred great benefits upon England by his repudiation of Papal authority. He took, as he considered it his duty to take, the side of individual liberty against ecclesiastical authority, and of England against Rome. The idea that an historian was to have no opinions of his own, or that, having them, he was to conceal them, never entered his mind.
That Froude had any prejudice against the Church of England as such is a baseless fancy. He believed in the Church of his childhood, and, unless the word be used in the narrow sense of the clerical profession, he never left it to the end of his days. It was to him, as it was to his father, a Protestant Church, out of communion with Rome, cut off from the Pope and his court by the great upheaval of the sixteenth century. It is unreasonable, and indeed foolish, to say that that opinion disqualified him to be the historian of Henry VIII., and Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth. The Catholicism of Lingard is not considered to be a disqualification by sensible Protestants. Froude's faults as an historian were of a different kind, and had nothing to do with his ecclesiastical views. He was not the only Erastian, nor was he an Erastian pure and simple. He has left it on record that Macaulay's unfairness to Cranmer in the celebrated review of Hallam's Constitutional History first suggested to him the project of his own book. His besetting sin was not so much Erastianism, or secularism, as a love of paradox. Henry VIII seemed to him not merely a great statesman and a true patriot, but a victim of persistent misrepresentation, whose lofty motives had been concealed, and displaced by vile, baseless calumnies. More and Fisher, honoured for three centuries as saints, he suspected, and, as he thought, discovered to have been traitors who justly expiated their offences on the block. He was not satisfied with proving that there was a case for Henry, and that the triumph of Rome would have been the end of civil as well as spiritual freedom: he must go on to whitewash the tyrant himself, and to prove that his marriage with Anne Boleyn, like his separation from Katharine of Aragon, was simply the result of an unselfish desire to provide the country with a male heir. The refusal of More and Fisher to acknowledge the royal supremacy may show that they were Catholics first and Englishmen afterwards, without impugning their personal integrity, or justifying the malice of Thomas Cromwell. To judge Henry as if he were a constitutional king with a secure title, in no more danger from Catholics than Louis XIV was from Huguenots, is doubtless preposterous. If the Catholics had got the upper hand, they would have deposed him, and put him to death. In that fell strife of mighty opposites the voice of toleration was not raised, and would not have been heard. Tyrant as he was himself, Henry in his battle against Rome did represent the English people, and his cause was theirs. Froude brought out this great truth, and to bring it out was a great service. Unfortunately he went too far the other way, and impartial readers who had no sympathy with Cardinal Campeggio were revolted by what looked like a defence of cruel persecution. The welfare of a nation is more important in history than the observance of any marriage; and if Henry had been guided by mere desire, there was no reason why he should marry Anne Boleyn at all. Froude's achievement, which, despite all criticism, remains, was marred or modified by his too obvious zeal for upsetting established conclusions and reversing settled beliefs.
The moment that Froude had made up his mind, which was not till after long and careful research, he began to paint a picture. The lights were delicately and adroitly arranged. The artist's eye set all accessories in the most telling positions. He was an advocate, an incomparably brilliant advocate, in his mode of presenting a case. But it was his own case, the case in which he believed, not a case he had been retained to defend. When he came to deal with Elizabeth he was on firmer ground. By that time the Reformation was an accomplished fact, and the fiercest controversies lay behind him. Disgusted as he was with the scandals invented against the virgin queen, he did not shrink from exposing the duplicity and meanness which tarnish the lustre of her imperishable renown. Like Knox, he was insensible to the charms of Mary Stuart, and that is a deficiency hard to forgive in a man. Yet who can deny that Elizabeth only did to Mary as Mary would have done to her? The morality of the Guises was as much a part of Mary as her scholarship, her grace, her profound statecraft, the courage which a voluptuous life never imparted. Froude was not thinking of her, or of any woman. He was thinking of England. Between the fall of Wolsey and the defeat of the Armada was decided the great question whether England should be Catholic or Protestant, bond or free. The dazzling Queen of Scots, like the virtuous Chancellor and the holy Bishop, were on the wrong side. Henry and Elizabeth, with all their faults, were on the right one. That is the pith and marrow of Froude's book. Those who think that in history there is no side may blame him. He followed Carlyle. "Froude is a man of genius," said Jowett: "he has been abominably treated." "Il a vu iuste," said a young critic of our own day* in reply to the usual charges of inaccuracy. The real object of his attack was that ecclesiastical corruption which belongs to no Church exclusively, and is older than Christianity itself.
— * Arthur Strong. —
The main portion of Froude's life for nearly twenty years was occupied with his History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is on a large scale, in twelve volumes. Every chapter bears ample proof of laborious study. Froude neglected no source of information, and spared himself no pains in pursuit of it. At the Record Office, in the British Museum, at Hatfield, among the priceless archives preserved in the Spanish village of Simancas, he toiled with unquenchable ardour and unrelenting assiduity. Nine-tenths of his authorities were in manuscript. They were in five languages. They filled nine hundred volumes. Excellent linguist as he was, Froude could hardly avoid falling into some errors. With his general accuracy as an historian I shall have to deal in a later part of this book. Here I am only concerned to prove that he took unlimited pains. He kept no secretary, he was his own copyist, and he was not a good proof- reader. Those natural blots, quas aut incuria fudit, aut humaria parum cavit natura, are to be found, no doubt, in his pages. From a conscientious obedience to truth as he understood it, and a resolute determination to present it as he saw it, he never swerved. He was not a chronicler, but an artist, a moralist, and a man of genius. Unless an historian can put himself into the place of the men about whom he is writing, think their thoughts, share their hopes, their aspirations, and their fears, he had better be taking a healthy walk than poring over dusty documents. A paste-pot, a pair of scissors, the mechanical precision of a copying clerk, are all useful in their way; but they no more make an historian than a cowl makes a monk.
Polloi men narthekophoroi Bakchoi de te pauroi
["There are many officials, but few inspired." Zenobius, 5.77]
There are many writers of history, but very few historians. Froude wrote with a definite purpose, which he never concealed from himself, or from others. He believed, and he thought he could prove, that the Reformation freed England from a cruel and degrading yoke, that the things which were Caesar's should be rendered to Caesar, and that the Church should be restricted within its own proper sphere. Those, if such there be, who think that an historian should have no opinions are entitled to condemn him. Those who simply disagree with him are not. No man is hindered by any other cause than laziness, incompetence, or more immediately profitable occupations, from writing a history of the same period in exactly the opposite sense.