It was not until Macaulay arose in England, and Prescott in the United States, that the modern school of historical writing was fairly developed. Macaulay explained his own theory when he said that “a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque, yet must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain
from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own.” William H. Prescott, though he sometimes trusted authorities who did not deserve his confidence, and was swayed by religious prejudice and an inability to comprehend the spirit of Catholic faith, came nearer to the perfection of Macaulay’s ideal than any previous writer. His imagination adorned the romantic tales of conquest and adventure in the New World with a splendor till then unknown; yet no one could charge that he had been led away by the temptations of a too luxuriant fancy, or had heightened the effect of his narrative by a single touch unauthorized in the musty chronicles from which he drew his material. Prescott’s earlier histories are stories in which the actors stand forth with as much distinctness, and incidents follow one another with as much rapidity and as close connection, as in a well-constructed novel. In his unfinished Philip II., he entered upon a wider field, which required a different treatment. It was no longer sufficient to tell a story well; he had to paint the manners of an age, the life and character of a nation, and to unravel the network of intrigue which constitutes the political history of Europe during a long and stirring period of time. That he did this, so far as his labors extended, with consummate art, no American reader needs to be told. But the system which he pursued was carried to a greater length by Macaulay—the best type, upon the whole, of the new school of historians of whom we purposed speaking in this article. Macaulay assumed that history ought to show us not merely the revolutions of dynasties, the clash of armies, and the intrigues of cabinets, but the daily life and conversation of all ranks of the people, from the prince to the peasant. It ought to teach us their habits of thought
and their mode of speech. It ought to open for us their private homes, their workshops, and their churches. It ought to depict national habits and character, or it could not explain national tendencies and aspirations. To do this, it must pick up a multitude of little things which the older writers thought beneath the dignity of history. It must invade the province of the poet and the novelist. Otherwise, he who would understand the reign of King James must read half of it in Hume and half in The Fortunes of Nigel.[116] Macaulay made many mistakes in the execution of this noble plan. He picked up too many things which were not so much undignified as untrustworthy. The sketches of society which he drew with such a masterly hand may have been true in their general effect; but he blundered in details. Besides, he was as hot a partisan as Hume, as inveterate a theorist as even the author of The Decline and Fall.
Whatever his mistakes and shortcomings, Macaulay rendered an invaluable service to literature by the impetus which his brilliant example gave to the new principles of historical composition. He may be said to have dealt the finishing blow to the old style, and shown us how a minute, faithful, and vivacious story ought to be set before the world—how the historian must draw his materials, not only from state-paper offices and formal chronicles, but from gossiping diaries, ballads, pamphlets, and all other sources in which are preserved traces of the condition of society and the domestic annals of the people. The period which he undertook to illustrate offered peculiar advantages for the development of his plan. It was a period when a great change was taking place in English
customs and ways of thought. The revolution, which not only exchanged one dynasty for another, but metamorphosed the very system of English government, merely followed in the path of a remarkable intellectual and social transformation, without which the political reversal would have been impossible. The events of the reign of James II. could not be explained under the old plan of writing history on stilts. They were incomprehensible except by one who could mingle familiarly with the English people, and learn by what steps they had reached their new departure. Only one period in the history of England showed changes of equal importance. That was the period which witnessed England’s apostasy from the Catholic faith; and it is the period which one of the latest and most brilliant of English historians has chosen for the subject of a work planned (if not executed) after Macaulay’s model.
Mr. James Anthony Froude attempted to trace the development of the English nation, from the day of Henry’s formal separation from the communion of the Holy See to the final establishment of Protestant ascendency at the death of Elizabeth. This is by no means the task he has accomplished, but it is the task he set himself at the beginning of his work. He purposed to show the processes by which a people, devotedly and even heroically faithful to the Roman See, became first schismatic and then heretical; how their character under the change of faith took on a new color; how the foundations of the English supremacy over Ireland and Scotland were laid in blood and crime; and how the maritime ascendency which has lasted three hundred years was established by the daring and enterprise of English sailors during the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign. Never had historian a more tempting
theme. If Mr. Froude had been a man of philosophical spirit, acute insight, industry, and literary honesty, he might have produced a work that for brilliancy would have rivalled Macaulay’s, and for dramatic interest would have been almost unequalled in our language. There was no lack of material. Since Hume and Lingard—one the most misleading, the other the driest of modern English historians—had treated the same period, an immense store of records and official documents had become accessible to scholars. The British State-Paper Office abounded with historic wealth which the earlier writers did not know. The archives of Simancas disclosed secrets long unsuspected, and unravelled mysteries that had long baffled investigators. And from a thousand sources new light had been thrown upon the social condition of England, new illustrations given of the tendency of English thought, new explanations offered of the development of English strength and English character.
In his first volume, Mr. Froude seemed to appreciate the nature of his task, and to go about it with something of the proper spirit. He set before us a lifelike picture of England in the early part of Henry’s reign, and displayed admirable art in reproducing the manners, the conversation, and the tendencies of the common people, as well as the superficial characteristics of the chief actors in the historical drama. But even in the first volume he showed the glaring faults which vitiated all his later labors, and, increasing as the work went on, made his history at last one of the worst that the present generation has produced. Fired with the zeal of a blind partisan, he forgot all his earlier purposes and all his earlier pictorial art in the enthusiasm of a fierce religious bigotry. It became
his object to describe a conflict for the possession of England between the powers of darkness and the powers of light. On the one hand stood the Pope of Rome and his agents, Catharine of Aragon, Wolsey, Mary Tudor, Philip of Spain, and the Queen of Scots. On the other, arrayed beneath the banner of civil and religious liberty, fought those bright beings, Henry VIII., Anne Boleyn, and Queen Elizabeth. Naturally, when Elizabeth at last triumphed in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Mr. Froude declared the battle over, and dropped his unfinished, ill-proportioned story. One qualification he certainly had. He shrank from no paradox. He carried his theory boldly over the most serious obstacles, and took even the nastiest fences in the life of Henry without an instant’s hesitation. The most fervent Anglicans were amazed at Mr. Froude’s admiration for the bluff, carnal-minded king, and wondered how he was to justify the new views of history which he set forth with such alluring boldness. It was not long before he taught them his method. “It often seems to me,” says Mr. Froude, in one of his collected essays, “as if history was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please.” Of course, when the historian takes the liberty of leaving out facts which do not please him, disarranging sequences which conflict with his preconceived theories, and giving his own peculiar coloring to incidents without caring what coloring actually belongs to them, it is indeed easy enough to make history spell whatever he pleases. At the very outset, Mr. Froude had an opportunity to try his skill in accommodating facts to theories. He began his story with Henry’s project for a divorce; and his starting-point was the assumption that
the king’s scruples were thoroughly conscientious, and no thought was given to Anne while he believed himself legally married to Catharine. To maintain this, the historian resorted to his characteristic vices—suppression and misrepresentation. He concealed the origin of Henry’s intercourse with Anne Boleyn, bringing her on the stage some years too late, with the air of one introducing a fresh arrival; and he grossly distorted the contemporary records from which he professed to quote. The king’s distaste for Catharine, he says, had risen to its worst dimensions before he ever saw Anne Boleyn. He adds that her first appearance at court was in 1525—which is an error, for she came to the court in 1522; and yet it was not until 1527 that we find Henry agitating the question of a divorce. That Mistress Anne during these five years was otherwise employed than in fascinating his majesty, Mr. Froude apparently wishes us to infer from the story that she was engaged to Lord Percy, the eldest son of the Earl of Northumberland. Lord Percy, to quote our author’s words, “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.” This, if Cavendish said it, would indeed afford a fair presumption that Anne was not at that time (the date is given by other authorities as 1524 or 1525) the object of the royal attentions. But Cavendish really says something very different. He declared that the king sent for Lord Northumberland, and ordered him to interrupt the affair. Mr. Froude could not help seeing this statement if he read Cavendish at all, and we do not understand how he is to be acquitted of gross and intentional misrepresentation