The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

What, then, it will be asked, was the real gist of the charges made against Froude by The Edinburgh Review? The question at issue was nothing less than the whole policy of Henry's reign, and the motives of the King. The character of Henry is one of the most puzzling in historical literature, and Froude had to deal with the most difficult part of it. To the virtues of his earlier days Erasmus is an unimpeachable witness. The power of his mind and the excellence of his education are beyond dispute. He held the Catholic faith, he was not naturally cruel, and, compared with Francis I., or with Henry of Navarre, he was not licentious. But he was brought up to believe that the ordinary rules of morality do not govern kings. That the king can do no wrong is now a maxim of the Constitution, and merely means that Ministers are responsible for the acts of the Crown. Henry could scarcely have been made to understand, even if there had been any one to tell him, what a constitutional monarch was. Though forced to admit, and taught by experience, that he could not safely tax his subjects without the formal sanction of Parliament, he was in theory absolute, and he held it his duty to rule as well as to reign. When Charles I. argued, a century later, that a king was not bound to keep faith with his subjects, it may be doubted whether he deceived himself. The thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. His duty to God Henry would always have acknowledged. A historian so widely different from Froude as Bishop Stubbs has pointed out that, if mere self-indulgence had been the king's object, the infinite pains he took to obtain a Papal divorce from Katharine of Aragon would have been thrown away. That he had a duty to his neighbour, male or female, never entered his head. His subjects were his own, to deal with as he pleased. Revolting as this theory may seem now, it was held by most people then, and there was not a man in England, not Sir Thomas More himself, who would have told the King that it was untrue.

It is with the divorce of Katharine that the difficulty of estimating Henry begins. Froude's narrative sets out with the marriage of Anne Boleyn. Here the reviewer plants his first arrow. The divorce was a nullity, having no authority higher than Cranmer's. Anne Boleyn, as is likely enough from other causes, was never the King's wife, and Elizabeth was illegitimate, though she had of course a Parliamentary title to the throne. It seems clear, however, that inasmuch as Katharine had been his brother Prince Arthur's wife, the King could not lawfully marry her, according to the canons of the Catholic Church. Why did he marry Anne Boleyn? The reviewer says because he was in love with her, and triumphantly refers to the King's letters, printed in the Appendix of Hearne's Ayesbury.* They are undoubtedly love-letters, and they contain one indelicate expression. Compared with Mirabeau's letters to Sophie de Monnier, they are cold and chaste. Froude says that the King wanted a male heir, and he gives the same reason for the scandalously indecent haste with which Jane Seymour was married the day after Anne's execution. The character of Henry VIII. is only important now as it bears upon the policy of his reign. That Froude washed him too white is almost as certain as that Lingard painted him too black. The notion that lust supplies the key to his marriages and their consequences is utterly ridiculous. The most dissolute of English kings was content, and more than content, with one wife. On the other hand, Froude does at least give a clue when he suggests that these frequent marriages were political moves. A female sovereign reigning in her own right had never been known in England, and up to the birth of Jane Seymour's son Edward the whole kingdom passionately desired that there should be a Prince of Wales. Edward himself was but a sickly child, and was not expected to live even for the short span of his actual career. Credulous indeed must they be who maintain the innocence either of Anne Boleyn or of Katharine Howard, and there seems small use in holding with the learned Father Gasquet that Anne was not guilty of the offences imputed to her, but had done something too bad to be mentioned on a trial for incest. It is a question of evidence, and the evidence is lost. But the Grand Jury which presented Anne was respectable, the Court which convicted her was distinguished, and neither she nor any of her paramours denied their guilt on the scaffold. Simple adultery in a queen was capital then, if indeed it be not capital now. In an ordinary husband Henry's conduct would have been revolting. It is not attractive in him. Stubbs pleads that we cannot judge him, and abandons the attempt in despair.

— * Oxford, 1720. —

As he rejects with equal decision both the Roman Catholic picture and Froude's, he only puts us all to ignorance again. Froude is at least intelligible.

It is a fact, and not a fancy, that Henry provided from the spoils of the monasteries for the defence of the realm, that he founded new bishoprics from the same source, that he disarmed the ecclesiastical tribunals, and broke the bonds of Rome. The corruption of at least the smaller monasteries, some of which were suppressed by Wolsey before the rise of Cromwell, is established by the balance of evidence, and the disappearance of the Black Book which set forth their condition was only to be expected in the reign of Mary. The crime which weighs most upon the memory of the King is the execution of Fisher and More.

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 assertion 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 masses rather than the classes, 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 passes 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 illustrated 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 unsurpassed by any other passage 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 bloody 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 shirt 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 tithed mint, and anise, and cummin. They made clean the outside of the cup and platter. They firmly believed that they were pleasing the Deity they worshipped when they deluged England with blood. The spirit of the Marian martyrs is one of the noblest 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 God. 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.