The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

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* June 21st, 1870.
+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 143.
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Freeman's reckless and unscholarly attacks upon Froude produced no effect upon his own master Stubbs, whom he was always covering with adulation. From the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1876 Stubbs pronounced Froude's "great book," as he called it, to be "a work of great industry, power, and importance." Stubbs was as far as possible from agreeing with Froude in opinion. An orthodox Churchman and a staunch Tory, he never varied in his opposition to Liberalism, as well ecclesiastical as political, and he had no sympathy with the reformers. But his simple, manly, pious character was incapable of supporting his cause by personal slander. Unlike Freeman, he had a rich vein of racy humour, which he indulged in a famous epigram on Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation. But he could appreciate Froude's learning and industry, for he was a real student himself.

The controversy between Froude and Freeman, however, was by no means at an end, and I may as well proceed at once to the conclusion of it, chronology notwithstanding. In the year 1877, Froude contributed to The Nineteenth Century a series of papers on the Life and Times of Thomas Becket, since republished in the fourth volume of his Short Studies. Full of interesting information, the result of minute pains, and excellent in style, they make no pretence to be, as the History was, a work of original research. They are indeed founded upon the Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, which Canon Robertson had edited for the Master of the Rolls in the previous year. They were of course read by every one, because they were written by Froude, whereas Robertson's learned Introduction would only have been read by scholars. Froude's conclusions were much the same as the erudite Canon's. He did not pretend to know the twelfth century as he knew the sixteenth, and he avowedly made use of another man's knowledge to point his favourite moral that emancipation from ecclesiastical control was a necessary stage in the development of English freedom. He may have been unconsciously affected by his familiarity with the quarrel between Wolsey and Henry VIII. in describing the quarrel between Becket and Henry II. The Church of the middle ages discharged invaluable functions which in later times were more properly undertaken by the State. Froude sided with Henry, and showed, as he had not much difficulty in showing, that there were a good many spots on the robe of Becket's saintliness. The immunity of Churchmen, that is, of clergymen, from the jurisdiction of secular tribunals was not conducive either to morality or to order.

Froude's essays might have been forgotten, like other brilliant articles in other magazines, if Freeman had let them alone. But the spectacle of Froude presuming to write upon those earlier periods of which The Saturday Review had so often and so dogmatically pronounced him to be ignorant, drove Freeman into print. If he had disagreed with Froude on the main question, the only question which matters now, he would have been justified, and more than justified, in setting out the opposite view. A defence of Becket against Henry, of the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer, would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as Froude's own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and Erastianism. There is a great deal more to be said for Becket than for Wolsey; and though Freeman found it difficult to state any case with temperance, he could have stated this case with power. But, much as he disliked Froude, he agreed with him. "Looking," he wrote, "at the dispute between Henry and Thomas by the light of earlier and of later ages, we see that the cause of Henry was the right one; that is, we see that it was well that the cause of Henry triumphed in the long run." Nevertheless he rushed headlong upon his victim, and "belaboured" Froude, with all the violence of which he was capable, in The Contemporary Review. Hitherto his attacks had been anonymous. Now for the first time he came into the open, and delivered his assault in his own name. Froude's forbearance, as well as his own vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring. The first sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance. "Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the Rolls Series. That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique. For Froude's style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to Freeman, "had," as he kindly admitted, "its merits." Page after page teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings. "On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of More and Fisher"; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question not of morality, but of evidence. "Mr. Froude by his own statement has not made history the study of his life," which was exactly what he had done, and stated that he had done. "The man who insisted on the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill of Attainder."

Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page. Immediately after charging Froude with "fanatical hatred towards the English Church, reformed or unreformed"—though he was the great champion of the Reformation—"a degree of hatred which must be peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"- like Freeman's bosom friend Green—he says that Froude "never reaches so high a point as in several passages where he describes various scenes and features of monastic life." But this could not absolve him from having made a "raid" upon another man's period, from being a "marauder," from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have written about, though he had not. Froude had "an inborn and incurable twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement about any matter." "By some destiny which it would seem that he cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds—at least which all other readers find—in his book he invariably substitutes another narrative out of his own head." "Very few of us can test manuscripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment's notice test references to manuscripts much nearer home." This is a strange insinuation from a man who never tested a manuscript, seldom, if ever, consulted a manuscript, and had declined Froude's challenge to let his copies be compared with his abridgment. One grows tired of transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes. Yet it is essential to clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge between Froude and his life-long enemy.

The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude's articles in The Nineteenth Century was fantastic. "Emperors and Popes, Sicilian Kings and Lombard Commonwealths, should be as familiar to him who would write The Life and Times of Thomas Becket as the text of the Constitutions of Clarendon or the relations between the Sees of Canterbury and York." If Froude had written an elaborate History of Henry II., as he wrote a History of Henry VIII., he would have qualified himself in the manner somewhat bombastically described. But even Lord Acton, who seemed to think that he could not write about anything until he knew everything, would scarcely have prepared himself for an article in The Nineteenth Century by mastering the history of the world. And if Froude had done so, it would have profited him little. He would have forgotten it, "with that calm oblivion of facts which distinguishes him from all other men who have taken on themselves to read past events." He would still have written "whatever first came into his head, without stopping to see whether a single fact bore his statements out or not." "Accurate statement of what really happened, even though such accurate statement might serve Mr. Froude's purpose, is clearly forbidden by the destiny which guides Mr. Froude's literary career." These extracts from The Contemporary Review are samples, and only samples, from a mass of rhetoric not unworthy of the grammarian who prayed for the damnation of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of irregular verbs. Freeman, whose self-assertion was perpetual, represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of truth. His own reverence for truth he illustrated quaintly enough at the close of his last article. "I leave others to protest," said this veracious critic, "against Mr. Froude's treatment of the sixteenth century. I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from original sources." I leave others to protest! From 1864 to 1870 Freeman had continuously attacked successive volumes of Froude's History in The Saturday Review. Yet he here makes in his own name a statement quite irreconcilable with his ever having done anything of the kind, and accompanies it with an admission which, if it had been made in The Saturday Review, would have robbed his invective of more than half its sting.

And now let us see what was the real foundation for this imposing fabric. Freeman's boisterous truculence made such a deafening noise, and raised such a blinding dust, that it takes some little time and trouble to discover the hollowness of the charges. With four-fifths of Froude's narrative he does not deal at all, except to borrow from it for his own purposes, as he used to borrow from the History in The Saturday Review. In the other fifth, the preliminary pages, he discovered two misprints of names, one mistake of fact, and three or four exaggerations. Not one of these errors is so grave as his own statement, picked up from some bad lawyer, that "the preamble of an Act of Parliament need not be received as of any binding effect." The preamble is part of the Act, and gives the reasons why the Act was passed. Of course the rules of grammar show that being explanatory it is not an operative part; but it can be quoted in any court of justice to explain the meaning of the clauses.

In his Annals of an English Abbey Froude allowed "Robert Fitzwilliam" to pass for Robert Fitzwalter in his proofs, and upon this conclusive evidence that Froude was unfit to write history Freeman pounced with triumphant exultation. He had some skill in the correction of misprints, and would have been better employed in revising proof- sheets for Froude than in "belabouring" him. Froude said that Becket's name "denoted Saxon extraction." An anonymous biographer, not always accurate, says that both his parents came from Normandy. It is probable, though by no means certain, that in this case the biographer was right, and Froude corrected the mistake when, in consequence of Freeman's criticisms, he republished the articles. Froude, on the authority of Edward Grim, who knew Becket, and wrote his Life, referred to the cruelty and ferocity of Becket's administration as Chancellor. Freeman declared that "anything more monstrous never appeared from the pen of one who professed to be narrating facts." Froude not only "professed" to be narrating facts: he was narrating them. The only question is whether they happened in England, in Toulouse, or in Aquitaine. Freeman exposed his own ignorance by alleging that Grim meant the suppression of the free lances, which happened before Becket became Chancellor. He did not in fact know the subject half so well as Froude, though Froude might have more carefully qualified his general words. Froude's account of Becket's appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, his scruples, and how he overcame them, is described by Freeman as "pure fiction." It was taken from William of Canterbury, and, though open to doubt upon some points, is quite as likely to be true as the narrative preferred by Freeman. The most serious error, indeed the only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement that Becket's murderers were shielded from punishment by the King. Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop. It is doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of Becket's assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether. Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly wrong.

But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce. He stooped to write the words, "Natural kindliness, if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost forgotten fame." The meaning of this sentence, so far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends published after his own premature death. If Froude had written anonymously against this work, the phrase "stabs in the dark" would have been intelligible. As he had written in his own name, and had not mentioned his brother's work at all, part at least of the accusation was transparently and obviously false.

At last, however, Freeman had gone too far. Froude had borne a great deal, he could bear no more; and he took up a weapon which Freeman never forgot. I can well recall, as can hundreds of others, the appearance in The Nineteenth Century for April, 1879, of "A Few Words on Mr. Freeman." They were read with a sense of general pleasure and satisfaction, a boyish delight in seeing a big bully well thrashed before the whole school. Froude was so calm, so dignified, so self- restrained, so consciously superior to his rough antagonist in temper and behaviour. Only once did he show any emotion. It was when he spoke of the dastardly attempt to strike him through the memory of his brother. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any person—not one—in whom, as I now think of him, the excellences of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure. Of my personal feeling towards him I cannot speak. I am ashamed to have been compelled, by what I can only describe as an inexcusable insult, to say what I have said." It was not difficult to show that Freeman's four articles in The Contemporary Review contained worse blunders than any he had attributed to Froude, as, for instance, the allegation that Henry VIII., who founded bishoprics and organised the defence of the country, squandered away all that men before his time had agreed to respect. Easy also was it to disprove the charge of "hatred towards the English Church at all times and under all characters" by the mere mention of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and Hooper. The statement that Froude had been a "fanatical votary" of the mediaeval Church was almost delicious in the extravagance of its absurdity; and it would have been impossible better to retort the wild charges of misrepresentation, in which it is hard to suppose that even Freeman himself believed, than by the simple words, "It is true that I substitute a story in English for a story in Latin, a short story for a long one, and a story in a popular form for a story in a scholastic one." In short, Froude wrote a style which every scholar loves, and every pedant hates. With a light touch, but a touch which had a sting, Froude disposed of the nonsense which made him translate praedictae rationes "shortened rations" instead of "the foregoing accounts," and in a graver tone he reminded the public that his offer to test the accuracy of his extracts from unprinted authorities had been refused. Graver still, and not without indignation, is his reference to Freeman's suggestion that he thought the Cathedral Church of St. Albans had been destroyed. Most people, when they finished Froude's temperate but crushing refutation, must have felt the opportunity for it should ever surprised that have arisen.