Hurrell Froude: Memoranda and Comments

by Louise Imogen Guiney

‘Shortly after this friendship began, the course of events also began which finally gave birth to the Oxford Movement. The break-up of parties caused by the Roman Catholic Emancipation was followed by the French and Belgian revolutions of 1830, and these changes gave a fresh stimulus to all the reforming parties in England: Whigs, Radicals, and Liberal religionists. Froude’s letters mark the influence of these changes on his mind. They stirred in him the fiercest disgust and indignation, and as soon as the necessity of battle became evident to save the Church (and such a necessity was evident) he threw himself into it with all his heart, and his attitude was henceforth that of a determined and uncompromising combatant. “Froude is growing stronger and stronger in his sentiments every day,” writes James Mozley, in 1832, “and cuts about him on all sides. It is extremely fine to hear him talk. The aristocracy of the country, at present, are the chief objects of his vituperation, and he decidedly sets himself against the modern character of the gentleman, and thinks that the Church will eventually depend for its support, as it always did in its most influential times, on the very poorest classes.” “I would not set down anything that Froude says for his deliberate opinion,” writes James Mozley a year later, “for he really hates the present state of things so excessively that any change would be a relief to him.” … “Froude is staying up, and I see a great deal of him.” … “Froude is most enthusiastic in his plans, and says, ‘What fun it is living

in such times as these! how could one now go back to the times of old Tory humbug?’” From henceforth his position among his friends was that of the most impatient and aggressive of reformers, the one who most urged on his fellows to outspoken language and a bold line of action. They were not men to hang back and be afraid, but they were cautious and considerate of popular alarms and prejudices, compared with Froude’s fearlessness. Other minds were indeed moving, minds as strong as his; indeed, it may be, deeper, more complex, more amply furnished, with a wider range of vision and a greater command of the field. But while he lived, he appears as the one who spurs on and incites, where others hesitate. He is the one by whom are visibly most felt the gaudia certaminis, and the confidence of victory, and the most profound contempt for the men and the ideas of the boastful and short-sighted present.

‘In this unsparing and absorbing warfare, what did Froude aim at—what was the object he sought to bring about, what were the obstacles he sought to overthrow?

‘He was accused, as was most natural, of Romanising: of wishing to bring back Popery. It is perfectly certain that this was not what he meant, though he did not care for the imputation of it. He was, perhaps, the first Englishman who attempted to do justice to Rome, and to use friendly language of it, without the intention of joining it. But what he fought for was not Rome, not even a restoration of Unity, but a Church of England such as it was conceived of by the Caroline divines and the Nonjurors. The great break-up of 1830 had forced on men the anxious question: “What is the Church, as spoken of in England? Is it the Church of Christ?” and the answers were various. Hooker had said it was “the nation”; and in entirely altered circumstances, with some qualifications, Dr. Arnold said the same. It was “the Establishment,” according to the lawyers and politicians, both Whig and Tory. It was an invisible and mystical body, said the Evangelicals. It was the aggregate of separate congregations, said the Nonconformists. It was the Parliamentary creation of the Reformation, said the Erastians. The true Church was the communion of the Pope, the pretended Church was a legalised

schism, said the Roman Catholics. All these ideas were floating about, loose and vague, among people who talked much about the Church. Whately, with his clear sense, had laid down that it was a divine religious society, distinct in its origin and existence, distinct in its attributes from any other. But this idea had fallen dead, till Froude and his friends put new life into it. Froude accepted Whately’s idea that the Church of England was the one historic uninterrupted Church, than which there could be no other, locally, in England; but into this Froude read a great deal that never was and never could be in Whately’s thoughts. Whately had gone very far in viewing the Church, from without, as a great and sacred corporate body. Casting aside the Erastian theory, he had claimed its right to exist, and if necessary, govern itself, separate from the State. He had recognised excommunication as its natural and indefeasible instrument of government. But what the internal life of the Church was, what should be its teaching and organic system, and what was the standard and proof of these, Whately had left unsaid. And this outline Froude filled up. For this he went the way to which the Prayer-Book, with its Offices, its Liturgy, its Ordination services, pointed him. With the divines who had specially valued the Prayer-Book, and taught in its spirit, Bishop Wilson, William Law, Hammond, Ken, Laud, Andrewes, he went back to the times and the sources from which the Prayer-Book came to us, the early Church, the Reforming Church (for such, with all its faults, it was), of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, before the hopelessly corrupt and fatal times of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which led to the break-up of the sixteenth. Thus, to the great question, What is the Church? he gave without hesitation, and gave to the end, the same answer that Anglicans gave and are giving still. But he added two points which were then very new to the ears of English Churchmen: (1) that there were great and to most people unsuspected faults and shortcomings in the English Church, for some of which the Reformation was gravely responsible; (2) that the Roman Church was more right than we had been taught to think, in many parts both of principle and practice, and that our quarrel with it on these

points arose from our own ignorance and prejudices. To people who had taken for granted all their lives that the Church was thoroughly “Protestant” and thoroughly right in its Protestantism, and that Rome was Antichrist, these confident statements came with a shock. He did not enter much into dogmatic questions. As far as can be judged from his Remains, the one point of doctrine on which he laid stress, as being inadequately recognised and taught in the then condition of the English Church, was the Primitive doctrine of the Eucharist. His other criticisms pointed to practical and moral matters: the spirit of Erastianism, the low standard of life and purpose and self-discipline in the clergy, the low tone of the current religious teaching. The Evangelical teaching seemed to him a system of unreal words. The opposite school was too self-complacent, too comfortable, too secure in its social and political alliances; and he was bent on shaming people into severer notions. “We will have a vocabularium apostolicum, and I will start it with four words: ‘pampered aristocrats,’ ‘resident gentlemen,’ ‘smug parsons,’ and ‘pauperes Christi.’ I shall use the first on all occasions; it seems to me just to hit the thing.” “I think of putting the view forward (about new monasteries), under the title of a ‘Project for Reviving Religion in Great Towns.’ Certainly colleges of unmarried priests (who might, of course, retire to a living, when they could and liked) would be the cheapest possible way of providing effectively for the spiritual wants of a large population.” And his great quarrel with the existing state of things was that the spiritual objects of the Church were overlaid and lost sight of in the anxiety not to lose its political position. In this direction he was, as he proclaims himself, an out-and-out Radical, and he was prepared at once to go very far. “If a National Church means a Church without discipline, my argument for discipline is an argument against a National Church; and the best thing we can do is to unnationalise ours as soon as possible”; “let us tell the truth and shame the devil: let us give up a National Church and have a real one.”[306] His criticism did not diminish in severity, or his proposals become less daring, as he felt that his time was growing short

and the hand of death was upon him. But to the end, the elevation and improvement of the English Church remained his great purpose. To his friend, as we know, the Roman Church was either the Truth or Antichrist. To Froude it was neither the whole Truth nor Antichrist; but like the English Church itself, a great and defective Church, whose defects were the opposite to ours, and which we should do wisely to learn from, rather than abuse. But, to the last, his allegiance never wavered to the English Church.

‘It is very striking to come from Froude’s boisterous freedom in his letters, to his sermons and the papers he prepared for publication. In his sermons his manner of writing is severe and restrained even to dryness. If they startle, it is by the force and searching point of an idea, not by any strength of words. The style is chastened, simple, calm, with the most careful avoidance of over-statement or anything rhetorical. And so in his papers, his mode of argument, forcible and cogent as it is, avoids all appearance of exaggeration or even illustrative expansion: it is all muscle and sinew; it is modelled on the argumentative style of Bishop Butler, and still more, of William Law. No one could suppose from these papers Froude’s fiery impetuosity, or the frank daring of his disrespectful vocabulary. Those who can read between the lines can trace the grave irony which clung everywhere to his deep earnestness.

‘There was yet another side of Froude’s character which was little thought of by his critics, or recognised by all his friends. With all his keenness of judgment and all his readiness for conflict, some who knew him best were impressed by the melancholy which hung over his life, and which, though he ignored it, they could detect. It is remembered still by Cardinal Newman. “I thought,” wrote Mr. Isaac Williams, “that knowing him, I better understood Hamlet, a person most natural, but so original as to be unlike any one else, hiding depth of delicate thought in apparent extravagances. Hamlet, and the Georgics of Virgil, he used to say, he should have bound together.” “Isaac Williams,” wrote Mr. Copeland, “mentioned to me a remark made on Froude by S. Wilberforce in his early days: ‘They talk of Froude’s fun, but somehow I

cannot be in a room with him alone for ten minutes without feeling so intensely melancholy, that I do not know what to do with myself. At Brighstone, in my Eden days, he was with me, and I was overwhelmed with the deep sense which possessed him of yearning which nothing could satisfy, and of the unsatisfying nature of all things.’”[307]