The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Freeman's trump card, however, was the Bishop of Lexovia, and that brilliant victory he never forgot. Froude examined the strange and startling allegation, cited by Macaulay in his introductory chapter, that during the reign of Henry VIII. seventy-two thousand persons perished by the hand of the public executioner. He traced it to the Commentaries of Cardan, an astrologer, not a very trustworthy authority, who had himself heard it, he said, from "an unknown Bishop of Lexovia." "Unknown," observed Freeman, with biting sarcasm, "to no one who has studied the history of Julius Caesar or of Henry II." Froude had not been aware that Lexovia was the ancient name for the modern Lisieux, and for twenty years he was periodically reminded of the fact. Had he followed Freeman's methods, he might have asked whether his critic really supposed that there were bishops in the time of Julius Caesar. Freeman failed to see that the point was not the modern name of Lexovia, but the number of persons put to death by Henry, on which Froude had shown the worthlessness of popular tradition.

Bishop Hooper was burnt at Gloucester in the Cathedral Close. Froude describes the scene of the execution as "an open space opposite the College." That shows, says Freeman, that Froude did not, like Macaulay, visit the scenes of the events he described. Perhaps he did not visit Gloucester, or even Guisnes. That Freeman's general conclusion was entirely wide of the mark a single letter from Froude to Skelton is enough to show. "I want you some day," he wrote on the 12th of December, 1863, "to go with me to Loch Leven, and then to Stirling, Perth, and Glasgow. Before I go farther I must have a personal knowledge of Loch Leven Castle and the grounds at Langside. Also I must look at the street at Linlithgow where Murray was shot."* Thus Freeman's amiable inference was the exact reverse of the truth.

— * Table Talk of Shirley, p. 131. —

Some of Freeman's methods, however, were a good deal less scrupulous than this. By way of bringing home to Froude "ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind," he cited the case of Bishop Coxe. "To Hatton," Froude wrote in his text,+ "was given also the Naboth's vineyard of his neighbour the Bishop of Ely." In a long note he commented upon the Bishop's inclination to resist, and showed how the "proud prelate" was "brought to reason by means so instructive on Elizabeth's mode of conducting business when she had not Burghley or Walsingham to keep her in order that" the whole account is given at length in the words of Lord North, whom she employed for the purpose. This letter from Lord North is extremely valuable evidence. Froude read it and transcribed it from the collection of manuscripts at Hatfield. As an idle rumour that Froude spent only one day at Hatfield obtained currency after his death, it may be convenient to mention here that the work which he did there in copying manuscripts alone must have occupied him at least a month. Now let us see what use Freeman made of the information thus given him by Froude. "Meanwhile," he says in The Saturday Review for the 22nd of January, 1870, "Mr. Froude is conveniently silent as to the infamous tricks played by Elizabeth and her courtiers in order to make estates for court favourites out of Episcopal lands. A line or two of text is indeed given to the swindling transaction by which Bishop Coxe of Ely was driven to surrender his London house to Sir Christopher Hatton. But why? Because the story gives Mr. Froude an opportunity of quoting at full length a letter from Lord North to the Bishop in which all the Bishop's real or pretended enormities are strongly set forth." Here follows a short extract from the letter, in which North accused Coxe of grasping covetousness. Now it is perfectly obvious to any one having the whole letter before him, as Freeman had, that Froude quoted it with the precisely opposite aim of denouncing the conduct of Elizabeth to the Bishop, whom he compares with Naboth. Freeman must have heard of Naboth. He must have known what Froude meant. Yet the whole effect of his comments must have been to make the readers of The Saturday Review think that Froude was attacking the Church, when he was attacking the Crown for its conduct to the Church.

— + History of England, vol. xi. p. 321. —

Freeman seemed to glory in his own deficiencies, and was almost as proud of what he did not know as of what he did. Thus, for instance, Froude, a born man of letters, was skilful and accomplished in the employment of metaphors. Freeman could no more handle a metaphor than he could fish with a dry fly. He therefore, without the smallest consciousness of being absurd, condemned Froude for doing what he was unable to do himself, and even wrote, in the name of The Saturday Review, "We are no judges of metaphors," though there must surely have been some one on the staff who knew something about them.

Froude had a mode of treating documents which is open to animadversion. He did not, as Mr. Pollard happily puts it in the Dictionary of National Biography, "respect the sanctity of inverted commas." They ought to imply textual quotation, Froude used them for his abridgments, openly proclaiming the fact that he had abridged, and therefore deceiving no one. Freeman's comment upon this irregularity is extremely characteristic. "Now we will not call this dishonest; we do not believe that Mr. Froude is intentionally dishonest in this or any other matter; but then it is because he does not know what literary honesty and dishonesty are." There is no such thing as literary honesty, or scientific honesty, or political honesty. There is only one kind of honesty, and an honest man does not misrepresent an opponent, as Freeman misrepresented Froude. To call a man a liar is an insult. To say that is not a liar because he does not know the difference between truth and falsehood is a cowardly insult. But Froude was soon avenged. Freeman gave himself into his adversary's hands. "Sometimes," he wrote,* "Mr. Froude gives us the means of testing him. Let us try a somewhat remarkable passage. He tells us "It had been argued in the Admiralty Courts that the Prince of Orange, 'having his principality of his title in France, might make lawful war against the Duke of Alva,* and that the Queen would violate the rules of neutrality if she closed her ports against his cruisers." Then follows a Latin passage from which the English is paraphrased. "We presume," continues Freeman in fancied triumph, "that the words put by Mr. Froude in inverted commas are not Lord Burghiey's summary of the Latin extract in the note, but Mr. Froude's own, for it is utterly impossible that Burghley could have so misconceived a piece of plain Latin, or have so utterly misunderstood the position of any contemporary prince." Presumption indeed. I have before me a photograph of Burghley's own words in his own writing examined by Froude at the Rolls House. They are "Question whether the Prince of Orange, being a free prince of the Empire, and also having his principality of his title in France, might not make a just war against the Duke of Alva." Froude abridged, and wrote "lawful" for "just." But the words which Freeman says that Burghley could not have used are the words which he did use, and the explanation is simple enough. Freeman was Freeman. Burghley was a statesman. Burghley of course knew perfectly well that Orange was not subject to the King of France, not part of his dominions, which is Freeman's objection. He called it in France because it, and the Papal possessions of Venaissin adjoining it, were surrounded by French territory. He called it "in France," as we should call the Republic of San Marino "in Italy" now. Freeman might have ascertained what Burghley did write if he had cared to know. He did not care to know. He was "belabouring Froude."

— * Saturday Review, Nov. 24th, 1866. —

Once Froude was weak enough to accept Freeman's correction on a small point, only to find that Freeman was entirely in error, and that he himself had been right all along. After much vituperative language not worth repeating, Freeman wrote in The Saturday Review for the 5th of February, 1870, these genial words, "As it is, there is nothing to be done but to catch Mr. Froude whenever he comes from his hiding- place at Simancas into places in which we can lie in wait for him." The sneer at original research is characteristic of Freeman. One can almost hear his self-satisfied laugh as he wrote this unlucky sentence, "The thing is too grotesque to talk about seriously; but can we trust a single uncertified detail from the hands of a man who throughout his story of the Armada always calls the Ark Royal the Ark Raleigh? … It is the sort of blunder which so takes away one's breath that one thinks for the time that it must be right. We do not feel satisfied till we have turned to our Camden and seen 'Ark Regis' staring us full in the face." Freeman did not know the meaning of historical research as conducted by a real scholar like Froude. Froude had not gone to Camden, who in Freeman's eyes represented the utmost stretch of Elizabethan learning. If Freeman had had more natural shrewdness, it might have occurred to him that the name of a great seaman was not an unlikely name for a ship. But he could never fall lightly, and heavily indeed did he fall on this occasion. With almost incredible fatuity, he wrote, "The puzzle of guessing how Mr. Froude got at so grotesque a union of words as 'Ark Raleigh' fades before the greater puzzle of guessing what idea he attached to the words 'Ark Raleigh' when he had got them together." When Freeman was most hopelessly wrong he always began to parody Macaulay. Corruptio optimi pessima. "Ark Raleigh" means Raleigh's ship, and Froude took the name, "Ark Rawlie" as it was then spelt, from the manuscripts at the Rolls House. He was of course right, and Freeman was wrong. But that is not all. Freeman could easily have put himself right if he had chosen to take the trouble. Edwards's Life of Raleigh appeared in 1868, and a copy of it is in Freeman's library at Owens College. Edwards gives an account of the Ark Raleigh, which was built for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh advancing two hundred pounds. Freeman, however, need not have read this book to find out the truth. For "the Ark Raleigh" occurs fourteen times in a Calendar of Manuscripts from 1581 to 1590, published by Robert Lemon in 1865. When Freeman was brought to book, and taxed with this gross blunder, he pleaded that he "did a true verdict give according to such evidence as came before him." The implied analogy is misleading. Jurymen are bound by their oaths, and by their duty, to find a verdict one way or the other. Freeman was under no obligation to say anything about the Ark Raleigh. Prudence and ignorance might well have restrained his pen.

Two blots in Froude's History Freeman may, I think, be acknowledged to have hit. One was intellectual; the other was moral. It was pure childishness to suggest that Froude had never heard of the peine forte et dure, and only invincible prejudice could have dictated such a sentence as "That Mr. Froude's law would be queer might be taken as a matter of course."* Still, it is true, and a serious misfortune, that Froude took very little interest in legal and constitutional questions. For, while they had not the same importance in the sixteenth century as they had in the seventeenth, they cannot be disregarded to the extent in which Froude disregarded them without detracting from the value of his book as a whole. He did not sit down, like Hallam, to write a constitutional history, and he could not be expected to deal with his subject from that special point of view. Freeman's complaint, which is quite just, was that he neglected almost entirely the relations of the Crown with the Houses of Parliament and with the courts of law. The moral blot accounts for a good deal of the indignation which Froude excited in minds far less jaundiced than Freeman's. No one hated injustice more than Froude. But cruelty as such did not inspire him with any horror. No punishment, however atrocious, seemed to him too great for persons clearly guilty of enormous crimes. I have already referred to his defence of the horrible Boiling Act which disgraced the reign and the parliament of Henry VIII. The account of Mary Stuart's old and wizened face as it appeared when her false hair and front had been removed after her execution may be set down as an error of taste. But what is to be said, on the score of humanity, for an historian who in the nineteenth century calmly and in cold blood defended the use of the rack? Even here Freeman's ingenuity of suggestion did not desert him. After quoting part, and part only, of Froude's sinister apology, he writes, "To all this the answer is very simple. Every time that Elizabeth and her counsellors sent a prisoner to the rack they committed a breach of the law of England."+ Any one who read this article without reading the History would infer that Froude had maintained the legality, as well as the expediency, of torture. That is not true. What Froude says is, "A practice which by the law was always forbidden could be palliated only by a danger so great that the nation had become like an army in the field. It was repudiated on the return of calmer times, and the employment of it rests a stain on the memory of those by whom it was used. It is none the less certain, however, that the danger was real and terrible, and the same causes which relieve a commander in active service from the restraints of the common law apply to the conduct of statesmen who are dealing with organised treason. The law is made for the nation, not the nation for the law. Those who transgress it do it at their own risk, but they may plead circumstances at the bar of history, and have a right to be heard." Thus Froude asserts as strongly and clearly as Freeman himself that torture was in 1580, and always had been, contrary to the law of England. On the purely legal and technical aspect of the question a point might be raised which neither Froude nor Freeman has attempted to solve. Would any Court in the reign of Elizabeth have convicted a man of a criminal offence for carrying out the express commands of the sovereign? If not, in what sense was the racking of the Jesuits illegal? But there is a law of God, as well as a law of man, and surely Elizabeth broke it. Froude's argument seems to prove too much, if it proves anything, for it would justify all the worst cruelties ever inflicted by tyrants for political objects, from the burning of Christians who refused incense for the Roman Emperor to Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel.