The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

Froude seldom did things by halves, and his apology for Cromwell is not half-hearted. He applauds the celebrated pronouncement, "I meddle with no man's conscience; but if you mean by liberty of conscience, liberty to have the mass, that will not be suffered where the Parliament of England has power." A great deal has happened since Cromwell's time, and the mass is no longer the symbol of intolerance, if only because the Church of Rome has no power to persecute. Cromwell would have had a short shrift if he had fallen into the hands of mass-goers. To tolerate intolerance is a Christian duty, and therefore possible for an individual. Whether it was possible for the Lord General in 1650 is a question hardly suited for popular treatment on a public platform. All that he did was right in Froude's eyes, including the prescription of "Hell or Connaught" for "the men whose trade was fighting, who had called themselves lords of the soil," and the abolition of the Irish Parliament. "I as an Englishman," said Froude, "honour Cromwell and glory in him as the greatest statesman and soldier our race has produced. In the matter we have now in hand I consider him to have been the best friend, in the best sense, to all that was good in Ireland." This is of course an opinion which can honestly be held. But to the Irish race all over the world such language is an irritating defiance, and they simply would not listen to any man who used it.

The expulsion of Presbyterians under Charles II. was foolish as well as cruel, for it deprived the English Government in Ireland of their best friends, and supplied the American colonies with some of their staunchest soldiers in the War of Independence. Enough were left, however, to immortalise the siege of Derry, while the native Irish failed to distinguish themselves, or, in plain English, ran away, at the Battle of the Boyne, and the defeat of James II. was recognised by the Treaty of Limerick. An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under Charles II. The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and forcible terms by Froude. Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his vigilant eye. "I believe," he said, "Bishops have produced more mischief in this world than any class of officials that have ever been invented." The petition of the Irish Parliament for union with England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought; Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that smuggling thrived better than any other trade. The country was pillaged by absent landlords, and "the mere hint of an absentee tax was sufficient to throw the younger Pitt into convulsions." The Irish Protestant Bishops provoked the savage satire of Swift, who doubted not that excellent men had been appointed, and only deplored that they should be personated by scoundrels who had murdered them on Hounslow Heath.

These lectures stung the Irish to the quick, and gave much embarrassment to Froude's American friends. The Irish found a powerful champion in Father Burke, the Dominican friar, who had been a popular preacher at Rome, and with an audience of his own Catholic countrymen was irresistible. Burke was not a well informed man, and his knowledge of history was derived from Catholic handbooks. But the occasion did not call for dry facts. Froude had not been passionless, and what the Irish wanted in reply was the rhetorical eloquence which to the Father was second nature. Burke, however, had the good taste and good sense to acknowledge that Froude suffered from nothing worse than the invincible prejudice which all Catholics attribute to all Protestants. As a Protestant and an Englishman, Froude could not be expected to give such a history of Ireland as would be agreeable to Irishmen. "Yet to the honour of this learned gentleman be it said that he frankly avows the injuries which have been done, and that he comes nearer than any man whom I have ever heard to the real root of the remedy to be applied to these evils." When his handling of documentary evidence was criticised, Froude repeated his challenge to the editor of The Saturday Review, which had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of fair play gave judgment in his favour. But how was public opinion to pronounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian II., granting Ireland to Henry II of England? The Bull was not in existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all. Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by later Bulls of succeeding Popes. The matter had no interest for Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore. Burke had more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian massacres of Such 1649. Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked upon heretics. The combat was not so much unequal as impossible. There was no common groud. Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if he were a Protestant. His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted alike for its eloquence and its justice. "In those singular labyrinths of intrigue and treachery," meaning the secret correspondence at the Castle, "I have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the reputation of Henry Grattan. I say nothing of the temptations to which he was exposed. There were no honours with which England would not have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not have paid to have silenced or subsidised him. He was one of those perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind. They passed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to turn his back on them. In every step of his life he was governed simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his country." Grattan's Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion of 1798. It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever sat within its walls. Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by the "delirium of nationality," and the true Irish statesman of his time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, whose name is only less abhorred by Irish Nationalists than Cromwell's own. Americans did not think nationality a delirium, and their ideal of statesmanship was not represented by Lord Clare.

The fifth and last of Froude's American lectures was reprinted in Short Studies with the title of "Ireland since the Union."* It has a closer bearing upon current politics than the others, and it runs counter to American as well as to Irish sentiment. "Suppose in any community two-thirds who are cowards vote one way, and the remaining third will not only vote, but fight the other way." The argument has often been used against woman's suffrage. One obvious answer is that women, like men, would vote on different sides. In a community where two-thirds of the adult male population were cowards problems of government would doubtless assume a secondary importance, and that there are limits to the power of majorities no sane Constitutionalist denies.

— * Vol. ii. pp, 515-598. —

Short of making Carlyle Dictator of the Universe, Froude suggested no alternative to the ballot-box of civilised life. This last lecture, however, is chiefly remarkable for the rare tribute which it pays to the services of the Catholic priesthood. Father Burke himself must have been melted when he read, "Ireland is one of the poorest countries in Europe. There is less theft, less cheating, less house-breaking, less robbery of all sorts, than in any country of the same size in the world. In the wild district where I lived we slept with unlocked door and open windows, with as much security as if we had been—I will not say in London or New York, I should be sorry to try the experiment in either place: I will say as if we had been among the saints in Paradise. In the sixteenth century the Irish were notoriously regardless of what is technically morality. For the last hundred years at least impurity has been almost unknown in Ireland. And this absence of vulgar crime, and this exceptional delicacy and modesty of character, are due alike, to their ever- lasting honour, to the influence of the Catholic clergy." That is the testimony of an opponent, and it is emphatic testimony indeed. To O'Connell Froude is again conspicuously unjust, and his remark that "a few attacks on handfuls of the police, or the blowing in of the walls of an English prison . . . will not overturn an Empire" is open to the observation that they disestablished a Church. When Froude came to practical politics, he always seemed to be "moving about in worlds not realised." His statement that national education in Ireland was the best that existed in any part of the Empire almost takes one's breath away, and the idea that no Irish legislature would have passed the Land Act is a strange fantasy indeed. Whether an Irish Parliament could be trusted to deal fairly by the landlords is an open question. That it would fail to consider the interests of the tenants is unthinkable. Froude was on much firmer ground when he employed the case of Protestant Ulster, the Ulster of the Plantation, as an argument against Home Rule. Those Protestants would, he said, fight rather than submit to a Catholic majority, and England could not assent to shooting them down. There is only one real answer to this objection, and that is that Protestant Ulster would do nothing of the kind. A logical method of reconciling contradictory prophecies has never been found. In 1872 Home Rule had no support in England, and even in Ireland the electors were pretty equally divided. Froude did not lay hold of the American mind, as he might have done, by showing the inapplicability of the Federal System which suits the United States to the circumstances of the United Kingdom.

The impression made by Froude upon his audiences in New York is graphically described by an American reporter.

"Mr. Froude improved very much in delivery and manner during this course of lectures …. In his earlier lectures his ways were awkward, his speech was too rapid, and he did not know what in world to do with his hands. It was quite to see him run them under his coat tails, spread them across his shirt front, stick them in his breeches pockets, twirl them in the arm-holes his vest, or hold them behind his back. He has now found out how to dispose of them in a more or less natural way. His delivery is less rapid, his voice better modulated, and his enunciation more distinct …. One of his most effective peculiarities, in inviting the attention of his hearers, is the exceeding earnestness of the manner of his address. This earnestness is not like that of rant. It is the result of his own strong conviction and his desire to impress others." That is a fair and unprejudiced estimate of Froude as he appeared to a trained observer who took neither side in the dispute. Many Irishmen shook hands with him, and thanked him for his plain speaking. Bret Harte told him that even those who dissented most widely from his opinions admired his "grit." But politicians had to think of the Irish vote, and the proprietors of newspapers could not ignore their Catholic subscribers. The priests worked against him with such effect that Mr. Peabody's servants in Boston, who were Irish Catholics, threatened to leave their places if Froude remained as a guest in their master's house. Father Burke, who had begun politely enough, became obstreperous and abusive. Froude's life was in danger, and he was put under the special protection of the police. The English newspapers, except The Pall Mall Gazette, gave him no support, and The Times treated his enterprise as Quixotic. A preposterous rumour that he received payment from the British Ministry obtained circulation among respectable persons in New York. He had intended to visit the Western States, but the project was abandoned in consequence of growing Irish hostility which made him feel that further effort would be useless. It was not that he thought his arguments refuted, or capable of refutation. He had considered them too long, and too carefully, for that. But the well had been poisoned. The malicious imputation of bribery was caught up by the more credulous Irish, and their priests warned them that they would do wrong in listening to a heretic. As for the American people, they had no mind to take up the quarrel. It was no business of theirs.

Some extracts from Froude's letters to his wife will show how much he enjoyed American hospitality, and how far he appreciated American character. "I was received on Saturday," he wrote from New York on the 4th of October, 1872, "as a member of the Lotus Club—the wits and journalists of New York. It was the strangest scene I ever was present at. They were very clever—very witty at each other's expense, very complimentary to me; and, believe me, they worked the publishers who were present for the profit they were making out of me." He was agreeably surprised by the merchant princes of New York. "There is absolutely no vulgarity about them. They are immensely rich, but simple, and rather elaborately 'religious' in the forms of their lives. A very long grace is always said before dinner. In this and many ways they are totally unlike what I expected." Again, after a description of Cornell's University, he says, "There is Mr. Cornell, who has made all this, living in a little poky house in a street with a couple of maids, his wife and daughters dressed in the homeliest manner. His name will be remembered for centuries as having spent his wealth in the very best institutions on which a country's prosperity depends. Our people spend their fortunes in buying great landed estates to found and perpetuate their own family. I wonder which name will last the longest, Mr. Cornell's or Lord Overstone's." "There is no such thing," he says elsewhere, "as founding a family, and those who save good fortunes have to give them to the public when they die for want of a better use to put them to."

With sincerely religious people, especially if they were Evangelicals, Froude felt deep sympathy. Patronage of religion he detested, most of all the form of it which prescribes religion for other people. An American philosopher called, and told him that, having failed to find a new creed, he thought the old superstitions had better be kept up, Popery for choice. "This," remarks Froude, "is what I call want of faith. If you can believe that what you are convinced is a lie may nevertheless exert a wholesome moral influence on people, and that, whether true or not, or rather though certainly not true, it is good to be preserved and taken up with, you are to all practical purposes an atheist."