In these two luxurious volumes we have the first instalment of an important work upon the most important period of English history. Six other volumes are to follow. Mr. Froude is a thorough good Protestant. His main purpose in this history seems to have been the glorification of the English reformers. For the worst sovereigns of the house of Tudor he displays an enthusiastic admiration which, one is tempted to believe, is half genuine sentiment, and half love of paradox. Catholics, of course, he could not have expected to satisfy; but he has gone too far to please even the members of his own Church. Of Henry VIII., whose apologist he has appropriately been called, he draws a flattering portrait:
"If Henry VIII.," he says, "had died previous to the first agitation of the divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the heaviest misfortunes which had ever befallen the country; and he would have left a name which would have taken its place in history by the side of that of the Black [{716}] Prince or of the conqueror of Agincourt. Left at the most trying age, with his character unformed, with the means at his disposal of gratifying every inclination, and married by his ministers when a boy to an unattractive woman far his senior, he had lived for thirty-six years almost without blame, and bore through England the reputation of an upright and virtuous king. Nature had been prodigal to him of her rarest gifts. In person he is said to have resembled his grandfather, Edward IV., who was the handsomest man in Europe. His form and bearing were princely; and amidst the easy freedom of his address, his manner remained majestic. No knight in England could match him in the tournament except the Duke of Suffolk; he drew with ease as strong a bow as was borne by any yeoman of his guard; and these powers were sustained in unfailing vigor by a temperate habit and by constant exercise." His state papers and letters lose nothing by comparison with those of Wolsey and Cromwell. He was an accomplished musician; he wrote and spoke in four languages; he was one of the best physicians of his age, an engineer, and a theologian. "He was 'attentive,' as it is called, 'to his religious duties,' being present at the services in the chapel two or three times a day with unfailing regularity, and showing to outward appearance a real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his life." In private he was good-humored and good-natured. But "like all princes of the Plantageuet blood, he was a person of a most intense and imperious will. His impulses, in general nobly directed, had never known contradiction; and late in life, when his character was formed, he was forced into collision with difficulties with which the experience of discipline had not fitted him to contend." "He had capacity, if his training had been equal to it, to be one of the greatest of men. With all his faults about him he was perhaps the greatest of his contemporaries."
Mr. Froude does not believe that the king's scruples respecting the validity of his marriage with Catharine of Aragon were inspired by his affection for Anne Boleyn. "They had arisen to their worst dimensions before he had ever seen Anne Boleyn." But Mr. Froude's narrative of the king's early intercourse with Anne is extremely unsatisfactory, not to say disingenuous. How long Henry may have cherished his scruples in secret, our author affords us no means of guessing; but the earliest intimation which he finds of an intended divorce was in June, 1527. It was in 1525, he says, that Anne came back from France and appeared at the English court. This is an error, and is inconsistent with other statements in the same chapter; the date was 1522; and almost immediately afterward the king began to pay Anne marked attention. Her celebrated love-passage with Lord Percy took place in 1523. Mr. Froude speaks of it as follows: "Lord Percy, eldest son of Lord Northumberland, as we all know, was said to have been engaged to her. He was in the household of Cardinal Wolsey; and Cavendish, who was with him there, tells a long romantic story of the affair, which, if his account be true, was ultimately interrupted by Lord Northumberland himself." Now what will be thought of our author's honesty when we say that Cavendish repeats again and again that the match was broken off by command of the king? Lord Northumberland did not appear in the matter at all until Wolsey, by his majesty's orders, had remonstrated with the young nobleman, and threatened him with dire consequences if he should persist in a pursuit which was displeasing to his sovereign. Mr. Froude carefully suppresses all allusion to intercourse between the king and his fair favorite, until the project of the divorce was well advanced,—not discussing or discrediting the statements of other historians respecting Henry's early passion for Anne Boleyn; but simply putting them behind his back, as matters of which it did not suit his purpose to take notice. This fashion of writing may do for romance, but not for history.
In demanding a divorce from his first queen, Henry has, as we might suppose, Mr. Froude's full approval:
"It may be admitted, or it ought to be admitted, that if Henry VIII. had been contented to rest his demand for a divorce merely on the interests of the kingdom; if he had forborne, while his request was pending, to affront the princess who had for many years been his companion and his queen; if he had shown her that respect which her [{717}] high character gave her a right to demand, and which her situation as a stranger ought to have made it impossible to him to refuse, his conduct would have been liable to no imputation, and our sympathies would without reserve have been on his side. … His kingdom demanded the security of a stable succession; his conscience, it may not be doubted, was seriously agitated by the loss of his children; and looking upon it as the sentence of heaven upon a connection the legality of which had from the first been violently disputed, he believed that he had been living in incest and that his misfortunes were the consequence of it. Under these circumstances he had a full right to apply for a divorce."
With all its faults, Mr. Froude's book tells many wholesome truths in a very forcible manner. Here is an admission which from such an out-and-out Protestant we should hardly have looked for; he is speaking of religious persecution:
"We think bitterly of these things, and yet we are but quarrelling with what is inevitable from the constitution of the world. … The value of a doctrine cannot be determined on its own apparent merits by men whose habits of mind are settled in other forms; while men of experience know well that out of the thousands of theories which rise in the fertile soil below them, it is but one here and there which grows to maturity; and the precarious chances of possible vitality, where the opposite probabilities are so enormous, oblige them to discourage and repress opinions which threaten to disturb established order, or which, by the rules of existing beliefs, imperil the souls of those who entertain them. Persecution has ceased among ourselves, because we do not any more believe that want of theoretic orthodoxy in matters of faith is necessarily fraught with the tremendous consequences which once were supposed to be attached to it. If, however, a school of Thugs were to rise among us, making murder a religious service; if they gained proselytes, and the proselytes put their teaching in execution, we should speedily begin again to persecute opinion. What teachers of Thuggism would appear to ourselves, the teachers of heresy actually appeared to Sir Thomas More, only being as much more hateful as the eternal death of the soul is more terrible than the single and momentary separation of it from the body. There is, I think, no just ground on which to condemn conscientious Catholics on the score of persecution, except only this: that as we are now convinced of the injustice of the persecuting laws, so among those who believed them to be just, there were some who were led by an instinctive protest of human feeling to be lenient in the execution of those laws; while others of harder nature and more narrow sympathies enforced them without reluctance, and even with exultation."
The following extract from an account of the feelings of the mass of the English people during the early stages of the divorce affair, must be rather unpalatable to the High-Church Episcopalians:
"They believed—and Wolsey was, perhaps, the only leading member of the privy council, except Archbishop Warham, who was not under the same delusion—that it was possible for a national church to separate itself from the unity of Christendom, and at the same time to crush or prevent innovation of doctrine; that faith in the sacramental system could still be maintained, though the priesthood by whom those mysteries were dispensed should minister in golden chains. This was the English historical theory handed down from William Rufus, the second Henry, and the Edwards; yet it was and is a mere phantasm, a thing of words and paper fictions, as Wolsey saw it to be. Wolsey knew well that an ecclesiastical revolt implied, as a certainty, innovation of doctrine; that plain men could not and would not continue to reverence the office of the priesthood, when the priests were treated as the paid officials of an earthly authority higher than their own. He was not to be blamed if he took the people at their word; if he believed that, in their doctrinal conservatism, they knew and meant what they were saying; and the reaction which took place under Queen Mary, when the Anglican system had been tried and failed, and the alternative was seen to be absolute union with Rome, or a forfeiture of Catholic orthodoxy, proves after all that he was wiser than in the immediate event he seemed to be; that if his policy had succeeded, and if, [{718}] strengthened by success, he had introduced into the Church those reforms which he had promised and desired, he would have satisfied the substantial wishes of the majority of the nation."
From an introductory chapter on the social condition of England in the early part of the sixteenth century, we extract the following graphic passage, as an example of Mr. Froude's fascinating style. Doubtless most of our readers will agree with us in wishing that so graceful a pen had been more worthily employed: