The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

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

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

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

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

The reviews of Froude's earliest volumes were mostly unfavourable.
The Times indeed was appreciative and sympathetic. But The Christian
Remembrancer was emphatic in its censure, and The Edinburgh Review,
of which Henry Reeve had just become editor, was vehemently hostile.

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

— * Dr. Lightfoot. —

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

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

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