The following letter was written from Salcombe just after the
General Election of 1886 and the defeat of Home Rule:
"A Devonshire farmer fell ill of typhus fever once. He had quarrelled with a neighbour, and the clergyman told him that he must not die out of charity, and must see the man and shake hands with him. He agreed. The man came. They were reconciled, and he was going away again when the sick farmer called him back to the bed-side. 'Mind you,' he said, 'if so be as I get over this here, 'tis to be as 'twas.'
"I am sorry to see we are taking for granted that we have got over the scare, and that ''tis to be as 'twas' in Parliament. If no way can be found of giving effect to the feeling of which has been just expressed, the old enemy will be back again stronger than ever. I, for my small part, shall finally despair of Parliamentary Government, and shall pray for a Chamberlain Dictatorship. I do not think politicians know how slight the respect which is now generally felt for Parliament, or how weary sensible people have grown of it and its factions.
"We are very happy down here. We have lost the Molt, but have a very tolerable substitute for it. The Halifaxes are at the Molt themselves, and considering what I am, and that he is the President of the Church Union, I think he and I are both astonished to find how well we get on together. The Colonists come next week to Plymouth. I have promised to meet them. Their dinner will be the exact anniversary of the arrival of the Armada off the harbour. That was the beginning of the English naval greatness and of the English Colonial Empire. Think of poor Oceana—75,000 copies of it sold. It stands for something that the English nation is interested in…. But I must not try your eyes any further."
It was in 1881 that Froude, whose connection with Fraser had ceased, wrote for Good Words the series of papers on The Oxford Counter- Reformation which are the best record hitherto published of his college life.* I have already referred to the vivid picture of John Henry Newman contained in one of them. On the 2nd of March, 1881, the aged Cardinal, writing from the Birmingham Oratory, sent a gracious message of acknowledgment. "My dear Anthony Froude," he began, "I have seen some portions of what you have been writing about me, and I cannot help sending you a line to thank you… I thank you, not as being able to accept all you have said in praise of me. Of course I can't. Nor again as if there may not be other aspects of me which you cannot praise, and which you may in a coming chapter of your publication find it a duty, whether I allow them or not, to remark upon. But I write to thank you for such an evidence of your affectionate feelings towards me, for which I was not prepared, and which has touched me very much. May God's fullest blessings be upon you, and give you all good. Yours affectionately, John H. Cardinal Newman."
— * Short Studies, fourth series, pp. 192-206. —
Froude carefully kept this letter, and, remote as their opinions were, he never varied in his loyal admiration of the illustrious Oratorian. That admiration, however, was purely personal, and did not affect in any degree the staunchness of Froude's principles. In 1883 Protestant Germany celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of Luther's birth, and Froude wrote for the occasion a short biography of the rebellious monk who changed the history of the world. He founded on the larger Life by Julius Koestlin, which had then just appeared, this little book makes no pretence to original learning or research. It is a polemical pamphlet by a master of English, and a fervent admirer of the illustrious Martin. "When the German states revolted against the Roman hierarchy," says Froude in his Preface, "we in England revolted also," and Luther's name was as familiar as Bunyan's to the Protestant Churches of England. The Catholic revival of which Froude had seen so much at Oxford was still in full swing.
"Nevertheless, we are still a Protestant nation, and the majority of us intend to remain Protestant. If we are indifferent to our Smithfield and Oxford martyrs, we are not indifferent to the Reformation, and we can join with Germany in paying respect to the memory of a man to whom we also, in part, owe our deliverance. Without Luther there would have been either no change in England in the sixteenth century, or a change purely political. Luther's was one of those great individualities which have modelled the history of mankind, and modelled it entirely for good. He revived and maintained the spirit of piety and reverence in which, and by which alone, real progress is possible."
Such was the temper in which Froude set about his task, and which made it a labour of love. Besides the great public events in Luther's career which are familiar to all, he gave a charming picture of the affectionate father, the genial host, the eloquent, humourous talker whose fragments of conversation, his Tischreden, are in Germany almost as popular as his hymns. Luther's dominant quality was force, and that was a quality which Froude, like Carlyle, honoured above all others. Luther was not in all respects like a modern Protestant. He had a great respect for authority, when it was genuine, and he believed in transubstantiation, which Leo X. regarded as a juggle to deceive the vulgar. If Luther's appearance before the Diet of Worms was, as Froude says, "the finest scene in human history," it is so because this solitary monk stood not for one form of religion against another, but for truth against falsehood, for earnest belief in divine things against a Church governed by unbelievers. The Renaissance in its most Pagan form had invaded the Vatican, and the Vicar of Christ appeared to Luther as Anti-Christ himself. If Charles V. had been Pope, and Leo X. had been emperor, we might never have heard of Luther. Froude sincerely respected Charles V., and held that Protestant historians had done him less than justice. Although Charles opposed the Reformation, he opposed it honestly, and his faith in his own religion was absolute. He was a Christian gentleman. As he entered Wittenberg after the battle of Mahlberg, some bishop asked him to dig up Luther's body and burn it. "I war not with the dead," he perhaps remembering the grand old Roman line:
Nullum cum victis certamen, et aethere cassis.