Few things annoyed Froude more than the attacks of Macaulay and other Liberals on Cranmer. This was not merely sentimental attachment on Froude's part to the compiler of the Prayer Book. He looked on the Marian Martyrs as the precursors of the Long Parliament and of the Revolution, the champions of liberty in church and State. He would have felt that he was doing less than his duty if he had taught his pupils mere facts. Those facts had a lesson, for them as well as for him, and his sense of what the lesson was had deepened with years. He had observed in his own day an event which made much the same impression upon him as study of the French Revolution had made upon Carlyle. When the Second Empire perished at Sedan, Froude saw in the catastrophe the judgment of Providence upon a sinister and tortuous career. If the duty of an historian be to exclude moral considerations, Froude did not fulfil it. That there were good men on the wrong side he perceived plainly enough. But that did not make it the right side, nor confuse the difference between the two.
Froude's second set of Oxford lectures, begun in the Easter Term of 1893, was entitled English Seamen of the Sixteenth Century, and the name of the first lecture in it, a thoroughly characteristic name, was The Sea Cradle of the Reformation. He was in his element, and his success was complete. How Protestant England ousted Catholic Spain from the command of the ocean, and made it Britannia's realm, was a story which he loved to tell. "The young King," Henry VIII., "like a wise man, turned his first attention to the broad ditch, as he called the British Channel, which formed the natural defence of the kingdom." It was "the secret determined policy of Spain to destroy the English fleet, pilots, masters, and sailors, by means of the Inquisition." In 1562, according to Cecil, more than twenty British subjects had been burnt at the stake in Spain for heresy, and more than two hundred were starving in Spanish prisons. There was work for Hawkins and Drake. They were both Devonshire men, like Raleigh.
'Twas ever the way with good Queen Bess,
Who ruled as well as a mortal can,
When she was stogged, and the country in a mess,
To send for a Devonshire man.
Spain paid heavily for the persecution of British sailors. In his fifth lecture, Parties in the State, Froude read with dramatic emphasis, and in a singularly impressive manner, the application of a seaman to Elizabeth for leave to attack Philip's men-of-war off the banks of Newfoundland. "Give me five vessels, and I will go out and sink them all, and the galleons shall rot in Cadiz Harbour for want of hands to sail them. But decide, Madam, and decide quickly. Time flies, and will not return. The wings of man's life are plumed with the feathers of death." When he uttered these tragic words, Froude paused, and looked up, and it seemed to those who heard him as if he felt that the time of his own departure was at hand. Elizabeth herself was never moved by sentiment, and final vengeance on Spain had to wait for the Armada, with which these lectures, like the History, conclude. The consequences he left to others who had more years before them than he himself. He loved to dwell on the glories of seamen, especially Devonshire seamen, whose descendants he had known from his boyhood. The open sea and the open air, the stars and the waves, were akin to him. His companions sometimes thought that he cared too little for the perils of the deep. A lady who went boating with him, and hazarded the opinion that they would be drowned, got no warmer comfort than "Very likely," which struck her as grim. Probably he knew that there was no danger. He was accustomed to storms, and rather enjoyed them than otherwise. His lectures on the Elizabethan heroes of the sea had a fascination for young Englishmen which no historical discourses ever surpassed.
These sea-tales were spread over a year, being delivered in the Easter Terms of 1893 and 1894. Before they were finished Froude had begun another course on the life and correspondence of Erasmus. Erasmus is one of the choicest names in the history of letters, the flower of the religious Renaissance. Simply and sincerely pious, he enjoyed without abusing all the pleasures of life, wrote such Latin prose as had not been known since Pliny, and learnt Greek that he might understand the true meaning of the New Testament. Hating the monks of his own time for their ignorance and coarseness, he was as learned as any Benedictine of old, and as a master of irony he is like a gentler Pascal, a more reverent Voltaire. He loved England, the England of Archbishop Warham, Dean Colet, and Sir Thomas More. English ladies too were much to his taste, and in his familiar letters he has described their charms with frank appreciation. Priest as he was, and strictly moral, he cultivated an innocent epicureanism, including the collection of manuscripts and the exposure of pretentious ignorance in high places. He felt imperfect sympathy with Luther, and his literary criticism would have made no reformation. He was indeed precisely what we now call a Broad Churchman, accepting forms as convenient, though not essential, to faith. No one was better qualified to interpret him than Froude, whose translations of his letters, though free and sometimes loose, are vivid, racy, and idiomatic. Froude was by no means a blind admirer of Erasmus. His favourite heroes were men of action, and he regarded Luther as the real champion of spiritual freedom.
Intellect, he used to say, fought no battles, and was no match for superstition. Without Luther there would have been no Reformation. There might well have been a Reformation without Erasmus.
Neither of them was necessary according to Contarini, and in truth the Reformation had many sides. When Selden attended the Westminster Assembly of Divines, he took occasion to remind his colleagues that the Scriptures were not written in English. "Perhaps in your little pocket Bibles with gilt leaves" (which they would often pull out and read) "the translation may be thus, but the Greek or the Hebrew signifies thus and thus." So he would speak, says Whitelock, and totally silence them. But neither were the Scriptures written in Latin. It was Erasmus who revived the study of the Greek Testament, the charter of the scholar's reformation. He gave the Renaissance, in its origin purely Pagan, a Christian direction, and prevented the divorce of learning from religion. He also protested against the confusion of Christianity with asceticism, and against belief in the superior sanctity of monks. He turned his satire upon corruption in high places, and did not spare the Holy See. His residence in England, his friendship with More, his admiration for the earlier and better part of Henry VIII.'s career, connected him with events of which Froude had Himself traced the development. Luther moved him sometimes to sarcasm. Toleration and comprehension were the watchwords of Erasmus. "Reduce the dogmas necessary to be believed," he said, "to the smallest possible number; you can do it without danger to the realities of Christianity. On other points, either discourage inquiry, or leave every one to believe what he pleases- then we shall have no more quarrels, and religion will again take hold of life." The subject was not a new one to Froude. He had lectured on Erasmus and Luther at Newcastle five-and-twenty years before. The contrast between the two reformers is perennially interesting. Goethe, a supreme critic, thought that reform of the Church should have been left to Erasmus, and that Luther was a misfortune.
But then Goethe, though he understood religious enthusiasm, did not see the need for it, and would have tolerated such a Pope as Leo X., who had excellent taste in literature, rather than see issues submitted to the people which should be left for the learned to decide.
The weak point of Froude's Erasmus is the inaccuracy of its verbal scholarship. "Sir," said Dr. Johnson of a loose scholar, "he makes out the Latin from the meaning, not the meaning from the Latin." This biting sarcasm would be inapplicable to Froude, who knew the dead languages, as they are called, well enough to read them with ease and enjoyment. But he took in the general sense of a passage so quickly that he did not always, even in translating, stop to consider the precise significance of every word. Literal conformity with the original text is of course not possible or desirable in a paraphrase. What Froude did not sufficiently consider was the difference between the translation and the translator himself, who cannot paraphrase properly unless he renders literally in his own mind. Froude gave abundant proof of his good faith by quoting in notes some of the very passages which are incorrectly rendered above. A great deal has been made by a Catholic critic of the fact that the book which checked Ignatius Loyola's "devotional emotions" was not Erasmus's Greek Testament, but his Enchiridion Militis Christiani, Christian Soldier's Manual. This mistake was unduly favourable to the saint. Froude did not mean to imply that it was the actual words of Scripture which had this effect upon Ignatius. He was referring to the great scholar's own notes, which are polemical, and not intended to please monks. The founder of the Jesuits would have doubtless regarded them as most detestable blasphemy. The Enchiridion, on the other hand, is a purely devotional book, though written for a man of the world.
"My object," says Froude in his Preface, "has been rather to lead historical students to a study of Erasmus's own writings than to provide an abbreviated substitute for them." The students who took the advice will have found that Froude was guilty of some strange inadvertences, such as mistaking through a misprint a foster brother for a collection of the classics, but they will not have discovered anything which substantially impairs the value of his work. His paraphrases were submitted to two competent scholars, who drew up a long and rather formidable list of apparently inaccurate renderings. These were in turn submitted to the accomplished Latinist, Mr. Allen of Corpus, who is editing the Letters of Erasmus for the Clarendon Press. Mr. Allen thought that in several cases Froude had given the true meaning better than a more literal translation would give it. There remain a number of rather trivial slips, which do not appreciably diminish the merit of the best attempt ever made to set Erasmus before English readers in his habit as he was. The Latin of Erasmus is not always easy. He wrote it beautifully, but not naturally, as an exercise in imitation of Cicero. Without a thorough knowledge of Cicero and of Terence he is sometimes unintelligible, in a few cases the text of his letters is corrupt, and in others his real meaning is doubtful. One of the most glaring blunders, "idol" for "old," is obviously due to the printer, and a more careful comparison with the Latin would have easily removed them all. But at seventy-six a little laxity may be pardoned, and these were the only Oxford lectures which Froude himself prepared for the press. The publication of English Seamen and the Council of Trent was posthumous.