The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

FROUDE AND FREEMAN

Froude's reputation as an historian was seriously damaged for a time by the persistent attacks of The Saturday Review. It is difficult for the present generation to understand the influence which that celebrated periodical exercised, or the terror which it inspired, forty years ago. The first editor, Douglas Cook, was a master of his craft, and his colleagues included the most brilliant writers of the day. Matthew Arnold, who was not one of them, paid them the compliment of treating them as the special champions of Philistia, the chosen garrison of Gath. On most subjects they were fairly impartial, holding that there was nothing new and nothing true, and that if there were it wouldn't matter. But the proprietor* of the paper at that time was a High Churchman, and on ecclesiastical questions he put forward his authority. Within that sphere he would not tolerate either neutrality or difference of opinion. To him, and to those who thought like him, Froude's History was anathema. Their detested Reformation was set upon its legs again; Bishop Fisher was removed from his pedestal; the Church of England, which since Keble's assize sermon had been the Church of the Fathers, was shown to be Protestant in its character and Parliamentary in its constitution. The Oxford Movement seemed to be discredited, and that by a man who had once been enlisted in its service. It was necessary that the presumptuous iconoclast should be put down, and taught not to meddle with things which were sacred.

—
* Alexander James Beresford Hope, some time member for the University
of Cambridge.
—

From the first The Saturday Review was hostile, but it was not till 1864 that the campaign became systematic. At that time the editor secured the services of Edward Augustus Freeman, who had been for several years a contributor on miscellaneous topics. Freeman is well known as the historian of the Norman Conquest, as an active politician, controversialist, and pamphleteer. Froude toiled for months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the caligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition assigning his proper share to each. Freeman wrote his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or an original document of any kind. Every historian must take his own line, and the public are concerned not with processes, but with results. I wish merely to point out the fact that, as between Froude and Freeman, the assailed and the assailant, Froude was incomparably the more laborious student of the two. It would be hard to say that one historian should not review the work of another; but we may at least expect that he should do so with sympathetic consideration for the difficulties which all historians encounter, and should not pass sentence until he has all the evidence before him. What were Freeman's qualifications for delivering an authoritative judgment on the work of Froude? Though not by any means so learned a man as his tone of conscious superiority induced people to suppose, he knew his own period very well indeed, and his acquaintance with that period, perhaps also his veneration for Stubbs, had given him a natural prejudice in favour of the Church. For the Church of the middle ages, the undivided Church of Christ, was even in its purely mundane aspect the salvation of society, the safeguard of law and order, the last restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched.

Historically, if not doctrinally, Freeman was a High Churchman, and his ecclesiastical leanings were a great advantage to him in dealing with the eleventh century. It was far otherwise when he came to write of the sixteenth. If the Church of the sixteenth century had been like the Church of the eleventh century, or the twelfth, or the thirteenth, there would have been no Reformation, and no Froude. Freeman lived, and loved, the controversial life. Sharing Gladstone's politics both in Church and State, he was in all secular matters a strong Liberal, and his hatred of Disraeli struck even Liberals as bordering on fanaticism. Yet his hatred of Disraeli was as nothing to his hatred of Froude. By nature "so over-violent or over-civil that every man with him was God or devil," he had erected Froude into his demon incarnate. Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong. He detested Froude's opinions. He could not away with his style. Freeman's own style was forcible, vigorous, rhetorical, hard; the sort of style which Macaulay might have written if he had been a pedant and a professor instead of a politician and a man of the world. It was not ill suited for the blood-and-thunder sort of reviewing to which his nature disposed him, and for the vengeance of the High Churchmen he seemed an excellent tool.

Freeman's biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I think the Dean's conduct was judicious. But there is no reason why a biographer of Froude should follow his example. On the contrary, it is absolutely essential that he should not; for Freeman's assiduous efforts, first in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary, Review, did ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more about Freeman's qualifications for the task which he so lightly and eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of April, 1857 [1867?], "You have found me out about the sixteenth century. I fancy that, from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get credit for knowing more of those times than I do. But one can belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are quite right when you say that I have 'never thrown the whole force of my mind on that portion of history.'"* These words pour a flood of light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade. His object was to belabour Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as he says, "very small," but sufficient for enabling him to dispose satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion, also writing to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, "I find I have a reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of which I am profoundly ignorant."+

— * Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman, vol. i. p. 381. + ibid. p. 382. —

It does not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in The Saturday Review to make people think that, as Froude's critic, he deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private disclaims.

Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After Freeman's death his library was transferred to Owens College, Manchester, and there, among his other books, is his copy of Froude's History. He once said himself, in reference to his criticism of Froude, "In truth there is no kind of temper in the case, but a strong sense of amusement in bowling down one thing after another." Let us see. Here are some extracts from his marginal notes. "A lie, teste Stubbs," as if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original documents. Another entry is "Beast," and yet another is "Bah!" "May I live to embowel James Anthony Froude" is the pious aspiration with which he has adorned another page. "Can Froude understand honesty?" asks this anxious inquirer; and again, "Supposing Master Froude were set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write paradoxes, would he not curse his day?" Along with such graceful compliments as "You've found that out since you wrote a book against your own father," "Give him as slave to Thirlwall," there may be seen the culminating assertion, "Froude is certainly the vilest brute that ever wrote a book." Yet there was "no kind of temper in the case," and "only a strong sense of amusement." I suppose it must have amused Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have been a very bad temper indeed.

In this judicial frame of mind did Freeman set himself to review successive volumes of Froude's Elizabeth. Froude did not always correct his proofs with mechanical accuracy, and this gave Freeman an advantage of which he was not slow to avail himself. "Mr. Froude," he says in The Saturday Review for the 30th of January, 1864, "talks of a French attack on Guienne, evidently meaning Guisnes. It is hardly possible that this can be a misprint." It was of course a misprint, and could hardly have been anything else. Guisnes was a town, and could be attacked. Guienne was a province, and would have been invaded. Guienne had been a French province since the Hundred Years' War, and therefore the French would neither have attacked nor invaded it. As if all this were not enough to show the nature and source of the error, the word was correctly printed in the marginal heading. In the same article, after quoting Froude's denial that a sentence described by the Spanish Ambassador de Silva as having been passed upon a pirate could have been pronounced in an English court of justice, Freeman asked, "Is it possible that Mr. Froude has never heard of the peine forte et dure?" Freeman of course knew it to be impossible. He knew also that the peine forte et dure was inflicted for refusing to plead, and that this pirate, by de Silva's own account, had been found guilty. But he wanted to suggest that Froude was an ignoramus, and for the purpose of beating a dog one stick is as good as another.