TORTURE AND THE RACK
had been a feature of Mary Stuart's reign, and not, as it was, the daily expedient of Elizabeth and Cecil, what bursts of indignant eloquence should we not have been favored with by our historian, and what admirable illustrations would it not have furnished him as to the brutalizing tendencies of Catholicity and the superior humanity and enlightenment of Protestantism? Nothing so clearly shows the government of Elizabeth to have been a despotism as her constant employment of torture. Every time she or Cecil sent a prisoner to the rack—and they sent hundreds—they trampled the laws of England under foot. These laws, it is true, sometimes authorized painful ordeals and severe punishments, but the rack never. Torture was never legally authorized in England. But the trickling blood, the agonized cries, the crackling bones, the "strained limbs and quivering muscles" (Froude vol. vi. p. 294) of martyred Catholics make these Tudor practices lovely in Mr. Froude's eyes, and he philosophically remarks, "The method of inquiry, however inconsonant with modern conceptions of justice, was adapted excellently for the outrooting of the truth." (Vol. vii. p. 293)
We can hardly believe that any other man of modern enlightenment could possibly entertain such opinions. They are simply amazing in their cold-blooded and crude ignorance. Torture is not only "inconsonant" with modern conceptions of justice, but also with ancient; for it is condemned even by the sages of the law which authorized it. If Mr. Froude had any knowledge of the civil law, he might have learned something of this matter from the Digests, (Liber xviii. tit. 18.) The passage is too long to cite, but one sentence alone tells us in a few words of the fallacy, danger, and decaption of the use of torture: "Etenim res est fragilis et periculosa, et quæ veritatem fallat."
So much for ancient opinion. And modern justice has rejected the horrible thing, not only on the ground of morality, but because it has been demonstrated to be a promoter of perjury and the worst possible means of "outrooting" the truth.
To return: the case of Cobham is not the only one in which Mr. Froude has prudently profited by criticism, and hastened, in a new edition of his work, to repair his blunder. Even a slight comparison of his first with his last edition will show him to be under deep obligations to his critics, and it would be wise in him to seek to increase his debt of gratitude by fresh corrections.
THE CHATELAR STORY
is told by Mr. Froude in his characteristic way, and, while acquitting Mary Stuart of blame, "she had probably nothing worse to accuse herself of than thoughtlessness," (vol. vii. p. 506,) manages to leave a stain upon her character. He prefaces the story with the statement that "she was selfish in her politics and sensual in her passions." Serious historians generally use language with some reference to its value; but one epithet costs Mr. Froude no more effort than another, although there is not a shadow of pretext thus far in his own version of Mary's history to justify so foul an outrage as the use here of this word "sensual." We pass on. Chatelar was a young Huguenot gentleman, a nephew of the noble Bayard, gifted and highly accomplished. He had accompanied his patron D'Amville to Scotland, and returned with him to France. D'Amville was a suitor for Mary's hand, and, after some time, dispatched Chatelar to Scotland with missives for the queen. Randolph was present when Chatelar arrived, and describes D'Amville's letter as of "three whole sheets of paper." Yet Mr. Froude, perfectly aware of all this, writes,
"He went back to France, but he could not remain there. The moth was recalled to the flame whose warmth was life and death to it."
The remainder is of a piece with this. Supernaturally penetrating in reading Mary Stuart's most hidden thoughts, Mr. Froude is blind to the vulgar envy of the parvenu Randolph, who, writing to Cecil, (Froude, vol. vii. p. 505, note,) has the mendacious impudence to speak of Chatelar as "so unworthy a creature and abject a varlet."
Of the rules that govern the admission of evidence in ordinary courts of law, Mr. Froude does not appear to have any knowledge, and at every page he manifests a total unconsciousness of the most rudimentary test to be applied to the testimony of a witness in or out of court. It is to see whether the witness has not some powerful motive to praise or to blame. Thus, when he desires to establish a high character for "the stainless Murray," he gives us the testimony of—his employers Elizabeth and Cecil! In telling us what Mary Stuart was, he most freely uses the hired pamphleteer Buchanan, although ashamed—as well he may be—to name his authority.[179] So also in the case before us, although the mean envy excited in Randolph by the accomplished and nobly-born young Frenchman is perfectly clear, Mr. Froude gives us the English envoy's dispatches as testimony not to be questioned.