The Life of Froude

by Herbert W. Paul

— * England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 365. —

Meanwhile Froude continued his History, and by the beginning of the year 1874 had brought it down to the Union, with which it concludes. No more unsparing indictment of a nation has ever been drawn. Except Lord Clare, and the Orange Lodges, formed after the Battle of the Diamond, scarcely an Irishman or an Irish institution spared. Grattan's Parliament, though it did contain a single Catholic, is condemned because it gave the Catholics votes in 1793. The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, an Englishman and a Protestant, in 1795, is justified because he was in favour of emancipation. Flood and Curran are treated with disdain. Burke, though he was no more a Catholic than Froude himself, is told that he was not a true Protestant, and did not understand his own countrymen. Sir Ralph Abercrombie was possessed with an "evil spirit," because he urged that rebels should not be punished by soldiers without the sanction of the civil magistrate. His successor, General Lake, who was responsible for pitch-caps, receives a gentle, a very gentle, reprimand.

"The United Irishmen had affected the fashion of short hair. The loyalists called them Croppies, and if a Croppy prisoner stood silent when it was certain [without a trial] that he could confess with effect, paper or linen caps smeared with pitch were forced upon his head to bring him to his senses. Such things ought not to have been, and such things would not have been had General Lake been supplied with English troops, but assassins and their accomplices will not always be delicately handled by those whose lives they have threatened occasionally. Not a few men suffered who were innocent, so far as no definite guilt could be proved against them. At such times, however, those who are not actively loyal lie in the borderland of just suspicion."* That all Irish Catholics were guilty unless they could prove themselves to be innocent is a proposition which cannot be openly maintained, and vitiates history if it be tacitly assumed. Froude honestly and sincerely believed that the Irish people were unfit for representative government. He compares the Irish rebellion of 1798 with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and suggests that Ireland should have been treated like Oude. Lord Moira, known afterwards as Lord Hastings, and Governor-General of India, is called a traitor because he sympathised with the aspirations of his countrymen. Lord Cornwallis is severely censured for endeavouring to infuse a spirit of moderation into the Executive after the rebellion had been put down. What Cornwallis thought of the means by which the Union was carried is well known. "I long," he said in 1799 "to kick those whom my public duty obliges me to court. My occupation is to negociate and job with the most corrupt people under heaven. I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without a Union the British Empire must be dissolved." That is the real case for the Union, which could not be better stated than Cornwallis has stated it. Carried by corrupt means as it was, it might have met with gradual acquiescence if only it had been accompanied, as Pitt meant to accompany it, by Catholic emancipation. On this point Froude goes all lengths with George III., whose hatred of Catholicism was not greater than his own. In the development of his theory, he was courageous and consistent. He struck at great names, denouncing "the persevering disloyalty of the Liberal party, in both Houses of the English Legislature," including Fox, Sheridan, Tierney, Holland, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk, who dared to propose a policy of conciliation with Ireland, as Burke had proposed it with the American colonies. Even Pitt does not come up to Froude's standard, for Pitt removed Lord Camden, and sent out Lord Cornwallis.

— * English in Ireland, iii. 336. —

It is no disqualification for an historian to hold definite views, which, if he holds them, it must surely be his duty to express. The fault of The English in Ireland is to overstate the case, to make it appear that there was no ground for rebellion in 1798, and no objection to union in 1800. The whole book is written on the supposition that the Irish are an inferior race and Catholicism an inferior religion. So far as religion was concerned, Lecky did not disagree with Froude. But either because he was an Irishman, or because he had a judicial mind, he could see the necessity of understanding what Irish Catholics aimed at before passing judgment upon them. Froude could never get out of his mind the approval of treason and assassination to which in the sixteenth century the Vatican was committed. It may be fascinating polemics to taunt the Church of Rome with being "always the same." But as a matter of fact the Church is not the same. It improves with the general march of the progress that it condemns. Froude fairly and honourably quotes a crucial instance. Pitt "sought the opinion of the Universities of France and Spain on the charge generally alleged against Catholics that their allegiance to their sovereign was subordinate to their allegiance to the Pope; that they held that heretics might lawfully be put to death, and that no faith was to be kept with them. The Universities had unanimously disavowed doctrines which they declared at once inhuman and unchristian, and on the strength of the disavowal the British Parliament repealed the Penal Acts of William for England and Scotland, restored to the Catholics the free use of their chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy." Toleration was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and complete emancipation might have followed but for the interference of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.

To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere. In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than anything else in the world. He even denied that there was such a thing as the Protestant religion. The difference between Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a negative no religion could be made. To persecute people for believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them for believing too little. Protestant ascendency was social ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it. Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablishing the Irish Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments. He would have been satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded. Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an illustrious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an almost fanatical enemy of revolution.

Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an opinion. He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of his birth. He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a firm supporter of her connection with the State. But his wife was a Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect. For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was associated, he felt a passionate hatred of which he has left a monument more durable than brass in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He worshipped the British Constitution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a pension from the king. The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour. That Burke should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circumstance, But it is a circumstance which entitles him to peculiar attention from the Irish historian. Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists. Their hero was his critic, Tom Paine. Yet Froude says that when Burke "took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his interference after 1789 had no result at all. So far as the French Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was to deter them from Revolutionary methods.

— * English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215. —

But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be trusted. If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a just interpreter of events. Froude looked at the rebellion and the Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange manifesto. Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an unusually eloquent specimen of its class; but they are not history, any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union. Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons. He had been elected in 1790 against the "patriot" Ponsonby, and was opposed to the Catholic franchise in 1793. He was a man of unblemished character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk nonsense. Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked. Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is disregarded. "All that was best and noblest in Ireland" was gathered into the Orange Association, which has been the plague of every Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a Catholic country "a sharp eye should be kept on Papists," and would doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an Irishman and a subject. The English in Ireland is reported to have been Parnell's favourite book. It made him, he said, a Home Ruler because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government. This was not Froude's principal object, but the testimony to his truthfulness is all the more striking on that account. Gladstone, who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the "truth and honour" of the writer.

If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the Catholic faith is a degrading superstition, and that Ireland is only saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book deserves little but praise. Although he did not study for it as he studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number of State Papers, with a great mass of official correspondence. Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London. But the scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed themselves in his mind before he began. He was to vindicate the Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he vindicated it. If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards, Froude assumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of original sin. He always found in them enough vice to account for any persecution of which they might be the victims. Just as he could not write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to O'Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the leaders of Irish opinion. They might be Protestants themselves; but they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough. It was enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude's historical reputation is to attack Carlyle's. "I have read," Carlyle wrote on the 20th of June, 1874, "all your book carefully over again, and continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than ever: a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with advantage; and the want of a copious, carefully weighed concluding chapter is more sensible to me than ever; but the substance of the book is genuine truth, and the utterance of it is clear, sharp, smiting, and decisive, like a shining Damascus sabre; I never doubted or doubt but its effect will be great and lasting. No criticism have I seen since you went away that was worth notice. Poor Lecky is weak as water—bilge-water with a drop of formic acid in it: unfortunate Lecky, he is wedded to his Irish idols; let him alone." The reference to Lecky, as unfair as it is amusing, was provoked by a review of Froude in Macmillan's Magazine. There are worse idols than Burke, or even Grattan, and Lecky was an Irishman after all.