The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

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* Saturday Review, Jan. 29th, 1870.
+ Saturday Review, Dec. 1st, 1867.
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The analogy of a commander in active service is inadequate. Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with him in 1586. "They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due precautions for the protraction of the pain. If it was to be taken as part of the Catholic creed that to kill a prince in the interests of Holy Church was an act of piety and merit, stern English common sense caught the readiest means of expressing its opinion on the character both of the creed and its professors."

Stern English common sense! To suggest that the English people had anything to do with it is a libel on the English nation. Elizabeth had the decency to forbid the repetition of such atrocities. That she should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude's.

On the 12th of January, 1870, Freeman delivered in The Saturday Review his final verdict on Froude's History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is one of the most preposterous judgments that ever found their way into print. In knowledge of the subject, and in patient assiduity of research, Froude was immeasurably Freeman's superior, and his life had been devoted to historic studies. Yet this was the language in which the editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died: "He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name has come to be used as a figure of speech, sometimes in strange company with his betters …. But an historian he is not; four volumes of ingenious paradox, eight volumes of ecclesiastical pamphlet, do not become a history, either because of the mere number of volumes, or because they contain a narrative which gradually shrinks into little more than a narrative of diplomatic intrigues. The main objections to Mr. Froude's book, the blemishes which cut it off from any title to the name of history, are utter carelessness as to facts and utter incapacity to distinguish right from wrong …. That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth—the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the name, cannot be written—is not in Mr. Froude's nature, and it would probably be impossible to make him understand what it is …. How far the success of the book is due to its inherent vices, how far to its occasional virtues, is a point too knotty for us to solve. The general reader and his tastes—why this thing pleases him and the other thing displeases him—have ever been to us the proroundest of mysteries. It is enough that on Mr. Froude's book, as a whole, the verdict of all competent historical scholars has long ago been given. Occasional beauties of style and narrative cannot be allowed to redeem carelessness of truth, ignorance of law, contempt for the first principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre de bonne foy.'"*

— * The Duke was not, as Freeman implies that he was, referring to Froude. —

By a curious irony of fate or circumstance Freeman has unconsciously depicted the frame of mind in which Froude approached historic problems. "That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth—the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the name, cannot be written," was the dominant principle of Froude's life and work. He had hitherto taken no notice of the attacks in The Saturday Review. The errors pointed out in them were of the most trivial kind, and mere abuse is not worth a reply. But even Gibbon was moved from his philosophic calm when Mr. Somebody of Something "presumed to attack not the faith but the fidelity of the historian." Froude passed over in contemptuous silence impertinent reflections upon his religious belief. His honesty was now in set terms impugned, and on the 15th of February, 1870, he addressed, through the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Frederick Greenwood, a direct challenge to Mr. Philip Harwood, who had become editor of The Saturday Review. After a few caustic remarks upon the absurdity of the defects imputed to him, such as ignorance that Parliament could pass Bills of Attainder, because he had said that the House of Lords would not pass one in a particular case, he came to close quarters with the imputation of bad faith. "I am," he said, "peculiarly situated"—as Freeman of course knew—"towards a charge of this kind, for nine-tenths of my documents are in manuscript, and a large proportion of those manuscripts are in Spain. To deal as fairly as I can with the public, I have all along deposited my Spanish transcripts, as soon as I have done with them, in the British Museum. The reading of manuscripts, however, is at best laborious. The public may be inclined to accept as proved an uncontradicted charge, the value of which they cannot readily test. I venture therefore to make the following proposal. I do not make it to my reviewer. He will be reluctant to exchange communications with me, and the disinclination will not be on his side only. I address myself to his editor. If the editor will select any part of my volumes, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred pages, wherever he pleases, I am willing to subject them to a formal examination by two experts, to be chosen—if Sir Thomas Hardy will kindly undertake it—by the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records. They shall go through my references, line for line. They shall examine every document to which I have alluded, and shall judge whether I have dealt with it fairly. I lay no claim to be free from mistakes. I have worked in all through nine hundred volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and official, in five languages and in difficult handwritings. I am not rash enough to say that I have never misread a word, or overlooked a passage of importance. I profess only to have dealt with my materials honestly to the best of my ability. I submit myself to a formal trial, of which I am willing to bear the entire expense, on one condition-that the report, whatever it be, shall be published word for word in The Saturday Review."

The proposal was certainly a novel one, and could not in ordinary circumstances have been accepted. But it is also novel to charge an historian of the highest character and repute with inability to speak the truth, or to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman, signing himself "Mr. Froude's Saturday Reviewer," replied in The Pall Mall Gazette. The challenge he left to the editor of The Saturday, who contemptuously refused it, and he admitted that after all Froude probably did know what a Bill of Attainder was. The rest of his letter is a shuffle. "I have made no charge of bad faith against Mr. Froude"—whom he had accused of not knowing what truth meant—"with regard to any Spanish manuscripts, or any other manuscripts. All that I say is, that as I find gross inaccuracies in Mr. Froude's book, which he does not whenever I have the means of testing him which was certainly not often—"I think there is a presumption against his accuracy in those parts where I have not the means of testing him. But this is only a presumption, and not proof. Mr. Froude may have been more careful, or more lucky"—meaning less fraudulent, or more skilful—"with the hidden wealth of Simancas than he has been with regard to materials which are more generally accessible. I trust it may prove so." If Freeman thought that he meant that, he must have had singular powers of self-deception. "I have been twitted by men of thought and learning"—whom he does not name—"for letting Mr. Froude off too easily, and I am inclined to plead guilty to the charge. I do not suppose that Mr. Froude wilfully misrepresents anything; the fault seems to be inherent and incurable; he does not know what historical truth is, or how a man should set about looking for it. As therefore his book is not written with that regard for truth with which a book ought to be written, I hold that I am justified in saying that it is not 'un livre de bonne roy.'"

It is difficult to read this disingenuous farrago of insinuation even now without a strong sense of moral contempt. But vengeance was coming, and before many years were over his head Freeman had occasion to remember the Hornfinn tag:

Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Froude himself took the matter very lightly. He had boldly offered the fullest inquiry, and Freeman had not been clever enough to shelter himself behind the plea that copies were not originals; he did not know enough about manuscripts to think of it. The blunders he had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved Derreen.* "I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book- twelve volumes—about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not dotted and t's not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity has discovered. Every one of the rascals has made a dozen blunders of his own, too, while detecting one of mine." Skelton's own testimony is worth citing, for, though a personal friend, he was a true scholar. "We must remember that he was to some extent a pioneer, and that he was the first (for instance) to utilise the treasures of Simancas. He transcribed, from the Spanish, masses of papers which even a Spaniard could have read with difficulty, and I am assured that his translations (with rare exceptions) render the original with singular exactness."+ And in the preface to his Maitland of Lethington the same distinguished author says, "Only the man or woman who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish material in the Record Office can properly appreciate Mr. Froude's inexhaustible industry and substantial accuracy. His point of view is very different from mine; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the intricacies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled." John Hill Burton, to whose learning and judgment Freeman's were as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine, concurred in Skelton's view, and no one has ever known Scottish history better than Burton.