The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

"I am now sufficiently master of the story to be able to make very good (I daresay complete) use of the Hatfield papers in my present condition. I feel as if there were very few dark places left in Queen Elizabeth's proceedings anywhere. I substantially end, in a blaze of fireworks, with the Armada. The concentrated interest of the reign lies in the period now under my hands. It is all action, and I shall use my materials badly if I cannot make it as interesting as a novel."

Nothing was neglected by Froude which could throw light upon the splendid and illustrious Queen who raised England from the depths of degradation to the height of renown. It was at the zenith of Elizabeth's career that Froude stopped. His original intention had been to continue till her death. But the ample scale on which he had planned his book was so much enlarged by his copious quotations from the manuscripts at Simancas that by the time he reached his eleventh volume he substituted for the death of Elizabeth on his title-page the defeat of the Armada. With the year 1588, then, he closed his labours. Even the perverse critics who had assumed to treat the History of Henry VIII. as an anti-ecclesiastical pamphlet were compelled to show more respect for volumes which gave so much novel information to the world. Moreover Henry's daughter was a very different person from her father. Scandal about Queen Elizabeth had been chiefly confined to Roman Catholics, and few Englishmen had forgotten who made England the mistress of the seas. The old religion had a strong fascination for her, and every one knows how she interrupted Dean Nowell when he preached against images. She declined to be the head of the Church in the sense arrogated by Henry, and yet she would by no means admit the supremacy of the Pope. If she ever felt any inclination towards Rome, the massacre of St. Bartholomew checked it for ever. Gregory XIII. and Catherine de Medici were rulers to her taste. On the other hand she resisted the persecuting tendencies of her Bishops, and spared the life even of such a wretch as Bonner. It is possible that she believed in transubstantiation. It is certain that she objected to the marriage of the clergy, and showed scant courtesy to the wife of her own favourite Archbishop Parker. Nor would she suffer the Bishops, except as Peers, to meddle in affairs of State. A magnificent princess, every inch a queen, she could not forget that the English people had saved her life from the clutches of her sister, and it was for them, not for any Minister, courtier, or lover, that she really cared.

Froude was no idolater of Elizabeth, and he became more unfavourable to her as he proceeded. He dwells minutely upon all her intrigues, in which she was as petty as in great matters she was grand. For her rival, Mary Stuart, he had neither respect nor mercy. To her intellect indeed, which was quite on a par with Elizabeth's, he does full justice. But neither her beauty nor her wit, neither her scholarship nor her statesmanship, neither her passion nor her courage, could blind him to her selfishness, her immorality, and the fact that she represented the Catholic cause. His account of her execution certainly lacks sentiment, and Mrs. Norton accused him of writing like a disappointed lover. His sympathies are with John Knox, and the Regent Murray, and Maitland of Lethington. But the man who believes that Mary was not concerned in the murder of her husband will believe anything, even that she did not reward the murderer of her brother, or that she would have spared Elizabeth if Elizabeth had been in her power. And at least Froude does not, like some more modern writers, degrade her to the level of a kitchen wench. Froude's Elizabeth was the subject of bitter, hostile, sometimes violent, criticism in The Saturday Review, the property of an ardent High Churchman, Beresford Hope. In the next chapter I shall deal with these articles at more length. It is enough to say here that they were directed not merely at Froude's accuracy as an historian, but at his truthfulness as a man, suggesting that the mode in which he had manipulated authorities accessible to every one threw grave doubts upon his version of what he read at Simancas. Froude knew very well that he should make enemies. His belief that history had been cericalised, and required to be laicised, was regarded as peculiarly offensive in one who had been himself ordained.

Mary Stuart, moreover, had stalwart champions beyond the border who were neither clerical nor ecclesiastical. "I fear," Froude wrote on the 22nd of May, 1862, to his Scottish friend Skelton, who was himself much interested in the subject—"I fear my book will bring all your people about my ears. Mary Stuart, from my point of view, was something between Rachel and a pantheress."

The success of the History had been long since assured, and each successive pair of volumes met with a cordial welcome. Many people disagreed with Froude on many points. He expected disagreement, and did not mind it. But no one could fail to see the evidence of patient, thorough research which every chapter, almost every page, contains. Indeed, it might be said with justice, or at least with some plausibility, that the long and frequent extracts from the despatches of De Feria, de Quadra, de Silva, and Don Guereau, successively Ambassadors from Philip to Elizabeth, water-log the book, and make it too like a series of extracts with explanatory comments. Of Froude's own style there could not be two opinions. His bitterest antagonists were forced to admit that it was the perfection of easy, graceful narrative, without the majestic splendour of Gibbon, but also without the mechanical hardness of Macaulay. Froude did not stop deliberately, as other historians have stopped, to paint pictures or draw portraits, and there are few writers from whom it is more difficult to make typical or characteristic extracts. Yet, as I have already quoted from his account of Cranmer's execution, it may not be inappropriate that I should cite some of the thoughts suggested to him by the death of Knox. Morton's epitaph is well known.

"There lies one," said the Earl over the coffin, "who never feared the face of mortal man." "Morton," says Froude, "spoke only of what he knew; the full measure of Knox's greatness neither he nor any man could then estimate. It is as we look back over that stormy time, and weigh the actors in it one against the other, that he stands out in his full proportions. No grander figure can be found, in the entire history of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox. Cromwell and Burghley rank beside him for the work which they effected, but, as politicians and statesmen, they had to labour with instruments which soiled their hands in touching them. In purity, in uprightness, in courage, truth and stainless honour, the Regent and Latimer were perhaps his equals; but Murray was intellectually far below him and the sphere of Latimer's influence was on a smaller scale. The time has come when English history may do justice to one but for whom the Reformation would have been overthrown among ourselves; for the spirit which Knox created saved Scotland; and if Scotland had been Catholic again, neither the wisdom of Elizabeth's Ministers, nor the teaching of her Bishops, nor her own chicaneries, would have preserved England from revolution. His was the voice that taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He was the one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was who had raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and rugged people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious and fanatical, but who nevertheless were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could force again to submit to tyranny. And his reward has been the ingratitude of those who should have done most honour to his memory."

The spirit of this fine passage may be due to the great Scotsman with whom Froude's name will always be inseparably associated. But Froude knew the subject as Carlyle did not pretend to know it, and his verdict is as authoritative as it is just. It is knowledge, even more than brilliancy, that these twelve volumes evince. Froude had mastered the sixteenth century as Macaulay mastered the seventeenth, with the same minute, patient industry. When he came to write he wrote with such apparent facility that those who did not know the meaning of historical research thought him shallow and superficial.

The period during which Froude was studying the reign of Elizabeth must be pronounced the happiest of his life. He was a born historian, and loved research. He had opportunities of acquiring knowledge opened to no one before, and it concerned those events which above all others attracted him. His second wife was the most sympathetic of companions, thoroughly understanding all his moods. She was fond of society, and induced him to frequent it. Froude was disinclined to go out in the evening, and would, if he had been left to himself, have stayed at home. He wrote to Lady Salisbury: "I must trust to your kindness to make allowance for my old-fashioned ways. I am so much engaged in the week that I give my Sunday evenings to my children, and never go out." But when he was in company he talked better than almost any one else, and he had a magnetic power of fascination which men as well as women often found quite irresistible. Living in London, he saw people of all sorts, and the puritan sternness which lay at the root of his character was concealed by the cynical humour which gave zest to his conversation. He had not forgotten his native county, and in 1863 he took a house at Salcombe on the southern coast of Devonshire. Ringrone, which he rented from Lord Kingsale, is a beautiful spot, now a hotel, then remote from railways, and an ideal refuge for a student. "We have a sea like the Mediterranean," he tells Skelton, "and estuaries beautiful as Loch Fyne, the green water washing our garden wall, and boats and mackerel." Froude worked there, however, besides yachting, fishing, and shooting.

In 1864, for instance, he "floundered all the summer among the extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics—the most damnable set of pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark." His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of the finest in England. Froude loved Devonshire folk, and enjoyed talking to them in their own dialect, or smoking with them on the shore. He was particularly fond of the indignant expostulation of a poor woman whose husband had been injured by his own chopper, and obliged in consequence to keep his bed. If, she said, it had been "a visitation of Providence, or the like of that there," he would have borne it patiently. "But to come upon a man in the wood-house" was not in the fitness of things. Froude's favourite places of worship in London were Westminster Abbey during Dean Stanley's time, and afterwards the Temple Church, as may be gathered from his Short Study on the Templars. In Devonshire he frequented an old-fashioned church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard. "Who is the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the King of glory."

As an editor Froude was tolerant and catholic. "On controverted points," he said, "I approve myself of the practice of the Reformation. When St. Paul's Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be pulled up before the same audience for what they might say." His own literary judgments were rather conventional. The mixture of classes in Clough's Bothie disturbed him. The genius of Matthew Arnold he had recognised at once, but then Arnold was a classical, academic poet. About Tennyson he agreed with the rest of the world, while Tennyson, who was a personal friend, paid him the great compliment of taking from him the subject of a poem and the material of a play. His prejudice against Browning's style, much as he liked Browning himself, was hard to overcome, and on this point he had a serious difference with his friend Skelton. "Browning's verse!" he exclaims. "With intellect, thought, power, grace, all the charms in detail which poetry should have, it rings after all like a bell of lead." This was in 1863, when Browning had published Men and Women, and Dramatic Lyrics. However, he admitted Skelton's article on the other side, and added, with magnificent candour, that "to this generation Browning's poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare's Sonnets were to the last century." The most fervent Browningite could have said no more than that. To Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads Froude was conspicuously fair. There was much in them which offended his Puritanism, but he was disgusted with the virulence of the critics, and he allowed Skelton to write in Fraser a qualified apology.