The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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* Saturday Review, Jan. 29th, 1870.
+ Saturday Review, Dec. 1st, 1867.
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The analogy of a commander in active service is inadequate.
Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active
service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any
Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the
end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack
was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either
confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy
Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for
the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus
describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with
him in 1586. "They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the
letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony
was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due
precautions for the protraction of the pain. If it was to be taken as
part of the Catholic creed that to kill a prince in the interests of
Holy Church was an act of piety and merit, stern English common sense
caught the readiest means of expressing its opinion on the character
both of the creed and its professors."

Stern English common sense! To suggest that the English people had
anything to do with it is a libel on the English nation. Elizabeth
had the decency to forbid the repetition of such atrocities. That she
should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as
his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude's.

On the 12th of January, 1870, Freeman delivered in The Saturday
Review his final verdict on Froude's History of England from the Fall
of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is one of the most
preposterous judgments that ever found their way into print. In
knowledge of the subject, and in patient assiduity of research,
Froude was immeasurably Freeman's superior, and his life had been
devoted to historic studies. Yet this was the language in which the
editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to
write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died:
"He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name
has come to be used as a figure of speech, sometimes in strange
company with his betters .... But an historian he is not; four
volumes of ingenious paradox, eight volumes of ecclesiastical
pamphlet, do not become a history, either because of the mere number
of volumes, or because they contain a narrative which gradually
shrinks into little more than a narrative of diplomatic intrigues.
The main objections to Mr. Froude's book, the blemishes which cut it
off from any title to the name of history, are utter carelessness as
to facts and utter incapacity to distinguish right from wrong ....
That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and
small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil
in the pursuit of truth--the spirit without which history, to be
worthy of the name, cannot be written--is not in Mr. Froude's nature,
and it would probably be impossible to make him understand what it is ....
How far the success of the book is due to its inherent vices,
how far to its occasional virtues, is a point too knotty for us to
solve. The general reader and his tastes--why this thing pleases him
and the other thing displeases him--have ever been to us the proroundest
of mysteries. It is enough that on Mr. Froude's book, as
a whole, the verdict of all competent historical scholars has long
ago been given. Occasional beauties of style and narrative cannot be
allowed to redeem carelessness of truth, ignorance of law, contempt
for the first principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the
most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we
have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as
a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No
merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the
whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself
a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant
phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre de bonne
foy.'"*

--
* The Duke was not, as Freeman implies that he was, referring to Froude.
--

By a curious irony of fate or circumstance Freeman has unconsciously
depicted the frame of mind in which Froude approached historic
problems. "That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters
great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time
and toil in the pursuit of truth--the spirit without which history,
to be worthy of the name, cannot be written," was the dominant
principle of Froude's life and work. He had hitherto taken no notice
of the attacks in The Saturday Review. The errors pointed out in them
were of the most trivial kind, and mere abuse is not worth a reply.
But even Gibbon was moved from his philosophic calm when Mr. Somebody
of Something "presumed to attack not the faith but the fidelity of
the historian." Froude passed over in contemptuous silence
impertinent reflections upon his religious belief. His honesty was
now in set terms impugned, and on the 15th of February, 1870, he
addressed, through the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Frederick
Greenwood, a direct challenge to Mr. Philip Harwood, who had become
editor of The Saturday Review. After a few caustic remarks upon the
absurdity of the defects imputed to him, such as ignorance that
Parliament could pass Bills of Attainder, because he had said that
the House of Lords would not pass one in a particular case, he came
to close quarters with the imputation of bad faith. "I am," he said,
"peculiarly situated"--as Freeman of course knew--"towards a charge
of this kind, for nine-tenths of my documents are in manuscript, and
a large proportion of those manuscripts are in Spain. To deal as
fairly as I can with the public, I have all along deposited my
Spanish transcripts, as soon as I have done with them, in the British
Museum. The reading of manuscripts, however, is at best laborious.
The public may be inclined to accept as proved an uncontradicted
charge, the value of which they cannot readily test. I venture
therefore to make the following proposal. I do not make it to my
reviewer. He will be reluctant to exchange communications with me,
and the disinclination will not be on his side only. I address myself
to his editor. If the editor will select any part of my volumes, one
hundred, two hundred, three hundred pages, wherever he pleases, I am
willing to subject them to a formal examination by two experts, to be
chosen--if Sir Thomas Hardy will kindly undertake it--by the Deputy
Keeper of the Public Records. They shall go through my references,
line for line. They shall examine every document to which I have
alluded, and shall judge whether I have dealt with it fairly. I lay
no claim to be free from mistakes. I have worked in all through nine
hundred volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and
official, in five languages and in difficult handwritings. I am not
rash enough to say that I have never misread a word, or overlooked a
passage of importance. I profess only to have dealt with my materials
honestly to the best of my ability. I submit myself to a formal
trial, of which I am willing to bear the entire expense, on one
condition-that the report, whatever it be, shall be published word
for word in The Saturday Review."

The proposal was certainly a novel one, and could not in ordinary
circumstances have been accepted. But it is also novel to charge an
historian of the highest character and repute with inability to speak
the truth, or to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman,
signing himself "Mr. Froude's Saturday Reviewer," replied in The Pall
Mall Gazette. The challenge he left to the editor of The Saturday,
who contemptuously refused it, and he admitted that after all Froude
probably did know what a Bill of Attainder was. The rest of his
letter is a shuffle. "I have made no charge of bad faith against Mr.
Froude"--whom he had accused of not knowing what truth meant--"with
regard to any Spanish manuscripts, or any other manuscripts. All that
I say is, that as I find gross inaccuracies in Mr. Froude's book,
which he does not whenever I have the means of testing him which was
certainly not often--"I think there is a presumption against his
accuracy in those parts where I have not the means of testing him.
But this is only a presumption, and not proof. Mr. Froude may have
been more careful, or more lucky"--meaning less fraudulent, or more
skilful--"with the hidden wealth of Simancas than he has been with
regard to materials which are more generally accessible. I trust it
may prove so." If Freeman thought that he meant that, he must have
had singular powers of self-deception. "I have been twitted by men of
thought and learning"--whom he does not name--"for letting Mr. Froude
off too easily, and I am inclined to plead guilty to the charge. I do
not suppose that Mr. Froude wilfully misrepresents anything; the
fault seems to be inherent and incurable; he does not know what
historical truth is, or how a man should set about looking for it. As
therefore his book is not written with that regard for truth with
which a book ought to be written, I hold that I am justified in
saying that it is not 'un livre de bonne roy.'"

It is difficult to read this disingenuous farrago of insinuation even
now without a strong sense of moral contempt. But vengeance was
coming, and before many years were over his head Freeman had occasion
to remember the Hornfinn tag:

Raro antecedentem scelestum
Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Froude himself took the matter very lightly. He had boldly offered
the fullest inquiry, and Freeman had not been clever enough to
shelter himself behind the plea that copies were not originals; he
did not know enough about manuscripts to think of it. The blunders he
had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his
antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved
Derreen.* "I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book-
twelve volumes--about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not
dotted and t's not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity
has discovered. Every one of the rascals has made a dozen blunders of
his own, too, while detecting one of mine." Skelton's own testimony
is worth citing, for, though a personal friend, he was a true
scholar. "We must remember that he was to some extent a pioneer, and
that he was the first (for instance) to utilise the treasures of
Simancas. He transcribed, from the Spanish, masses of papers which
even a Spaniard could have read with difficulty, and I am assured
that his translations (with rare exceptions) render the original with
singular exactness."+ And in the preface to his Maitland of
Lethington the same distinguished author says, "Only the man or woman
who has had to work upon the mass of Scottish material in the Record
Office can properly appreciate Mr. Froude's inexhaustible industry
and substantial accuracy. His point of view is very different from
mine; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the
intricacies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to
me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled." John Hill Burton, to
whose learning and judgment Freeman's were as moonlight unto
sunlight, and as water unto wine, concurred in Skelton's view, and
no one has ever known Scottish history better than Burton.

--
* June 21st, 1870.
+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 143.
--

Freeman's reckless and unscholarly attacks upon Froude produced no
effect upon his own master Stubbs, whom he was always covering with
adulation. From the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1876 Stubbs
pronounced Froude's "great book," as he called it, to be "a work of
great industry, power, and importance." Stubbs was as far as possible
from agreeing with Froude in opinion. An orthodox Churchman and a
staunch Tory, he never varied in his opposition to Liberalism, as
well ecclesiastical as political, and he had no sympathy with the
reformers. But his simple, manly, pious character was incapable of
supporting his cause by personal slander. Unlike Freeman, he had a
rich vein of racy humour, which he indulged in a famous epigram on
Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation. But he could
appreciate Froude's learning and industry, for he was a real student
himself.

The controversy between Froude and Freeman, however, was by no means
at an end, and I may as well proceed at once to the conclusion of it,
chronology notwithstanding. In the year 1877, Froude contributed to
The Nineteenth Century a series of papers on the Life and Times of
Thomas Becket, since republished in the fourth volume of his Short
Studies. Full of interesting information, the result of minute pains,
and excellent in style, they make no pretence to be, as the History
was, a work of original research. They are indeed founded upon the
Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, which Canon Robertson had
edited for the Master of the Rolls in the previous year. They were of
course read by every one, because they were written by Froude,
whereas Robertson's learned Introduction would only have been read by
scholars. Froude's conclusions were much the same as the erudite
Canon's. He did not pretend to know the twelfth century as he knew
the sixteenth, and he avowedly made use of another man's knowledge to
point his favourite moral that emancipation from ecclesiastical
control was a necessary stage in the development of English freedom.
He may have been unconsciously affected by his familiarity with the
quarrel between Wolsey and Henry VIII. in describing the quarrel
between Becket and Henry II. The Church of the middle ages discharged
invaluable functions which in later times were more properly
undertaken by the State. Froude sided with Henry, and showed, as he
had not much difficulty in showing, that there were a good many spots
on the robe of Becket's saintliness. The immunity of Churchmen, that
is, of clergymen, from the jurisdiction of secular tribunals was not
conducive either to morality or to order.

Froude's essays might have been forgotten, like other brilliant
articles in other magazines, if Freeman had let them alone. But the
spectacle of Froude presuming to write upon those earlier periods of
which The Saturday Review had so often and so dogmatically pronounced
him to be ignorant, drove Freeman into print. If he had disagreed
with Froude on the main question, the only question which matters
now, he would have been justified, and more than justified, in
setting out the opposite view. A defence of Becket against Henry, of
the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer,
would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as
Froude's own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and
Erastianism. There is a great deal more to be said for Becket than
for Wolsey; and though Freeman found it difficult to state any case
with temperance, he could have stated this case with power. But, much
as he disliked Froude, he agreed with him. "Looking," he wrote, "at
the dispute between Henry and Thomas by the light of earlier and of
later ages, we see that the cause of Henry was the right one; that
is, we see that it was well that the cause of Henry triumphed in the
long run." Nevertheless he rushed headlong upon his victim, and
"belaboured" Froude, with all the violence of which he was capable,
in The Contemporary Review. Hitherto his attacks had been anonymous.
Now for the first time he came into the open, and delivered his
assault in his own name. Froude's forbearance, as well as his own
vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring. The first
sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for
which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance.
"Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will
hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval
history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry
was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have
cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history
belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude
should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of
Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor
Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the
Rolls Series. That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public
was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique. For
Froude's style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to
Freeman, "had," as he kindly admitted, "its merits." Page after page
teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the
metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings.
"On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every
man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the
web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of
More and Fisher"; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question
not of morality, but of evidence. "Mr. Froude by his own statement
has not made history the study of his life," which was exactly what
he had done, and stated that he had done. "The man who insisted on
the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had
never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill
of Attainder."

Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page.
Immediately after charging Froude with "fanatical hatred towards the
English Church, reformed or unreformed"--though he was the great
champion of the Reformation--"a degree of hatred which must be
peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"-
like Freeman's bosom friend Green--he says that Froude "never reaches
so high a point as in several passages where he describes various
scenes and features of monastic life." But this could not absolve him
from having made a "raid" upon another man's period, from being a
"marauder," from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have
written about, though he had not. Froude had "an inborn and incurable
twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement
about any matter." "By some destiny which it would seem that he
cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds--at least
which all other readers find--in his book he invariably substitutes
another narrative out of his own head." "Very few of us can test
manuscripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment's
notice test references to manuscripts much nearer home." This is a
strange insinuation from a man who never tested a manuscript, seldom,
if ever, consulted a manuscript, and had declined Froude's challenge
to let his copies be compared with his abridgment. One grows tired of
transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes. Yet it is essential to
clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge
between Froude and his life-long enemy.

The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude's articles in
The Nineteenth Century was fantastic. "Emperors and Popes, Sicilian
Kings and Lombard Commonwealths, should be as familiar to him who
would write The Life and Times of Thomas Becket as the text of the
Constitutions of Clarendon or the relations between the Sees of
Canterbury and York." If Froude had written an elaborate History of
Henry II., as he wrote a History of Henry VIII., he would have
qualified himself in the manner somewhat bombastically described. But
even Lord Acton, who seemed to think that he could not write about
anything until he knew everything, would scarcely have prepared
himself for an article in The Nineteenth Century by mastering the
history of the world. And if Froude had done so, it would have
profited him little. He would have forgotten it, "with that calm
oblivion of facts which distinguishes him from all other men who have
taken on themselves to read past events." He would still have written
"whatever first came into his head, without stopping to see whether a
single fact bore his statements out or not." "Accurate statement of
what really happened, even though such accurate statement might serve
Mr. Froude's purpose, is clearly forbidden by the destiny which
guides Mr. Froude's literary career." These extracts from The
Contemporary Review are samples, and only samples, from a mass of
rhetoric not unworthy of the grammarian who prayed for the damnation
of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of
irregular verbs. Freeman, whose self-assertion was perpetual,
represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of
truth. His own reverence for truth he illustrated quaintly enough at
the close of his last article. "I leave others to protest," said this
veracious critic, "against Mr. Froude's treatment of the sixteenth
century. I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from
original sources." I leave others to protest! From 1864 to 1870
Freeman had continuously attacked successive volumes of Froude's
History in The Saturday Review. Yet he here makes in his own name a
statement quite irreconcilable with his ever having done anything of
the kind, and accompanies it with an admission which, if it had been
made in The Saturday Review, would have robbed his invective of more
than half its sting.

And now let us see what was the real foundation for this imposing
fabric. Freeman's boisterous truculence made such a deafening noise,
and raised such a blinding dust, that it takes some little time and
trouble to discover the hollowness of the charges. With four-fifths
of Froude's narrative he does not deal at all, except to borrow from
it for his own purposes, as he used to borrow from the History in The
Saturday Review. In the other fifth, the preliminary pages, he
discovered two misprints of names, one mistake of fact, and three or
four exaggerations. Not one of these errors is so grave as his own
statement, picked up from some bad lawyer, that "the preamble of an
Act of Parliament need not be received as of any binding effect." The
preamble is part of the Act, and gives the reasons why the Act was
passed. Of course the rules of grammar show that being explanatory it
is not an operative part; but it can be quoted in any court of
justice to explain the meaning of the clauses.

In his Annals of an English Abbey Froude allowed "Robert Fitzwilliam"
to pass for Robert Fitzwalter in his proofs, and upon this conclusive
evidence that Froude was unfit to write history Freeman pounced with
triumphant exultation. He had some skill in the correction of
misprints, and would have been better employed in revising proof-
sheets for Froude than in "belabouring" him. Froude said that
Becket's name "denoted Saxon extraction." An anonymous biographer,
not always accurate, says that both his parents came from Normandy.
It is probable, though by no means certain, that in this case the
biographer was right, and Froude corrected the mistake when, in
consequence of Freeman's criticisms, he republished the articles.
Froude, on the authority of Edward Grim, who knew Becket, and wrote
his Life, referred to the cruelty and ferocity of Becket's
administration as Chancellor. Freeman declared that "anything more
monstrous never appeared from the pen of one who professed to be
narrating facts." Froude not only "professed" to be narrating facts:
he was narrating them. The only question is whether they happened in
England, in Toulouse, or in Aquitaine. Freeman exposed his own
ignorance by alleging that Grim meant the suppression of the free
lances, which happened before Becket became Chancellor. He did not in
fact know the subject half so well as Froude, though Froude might
have more carefully qualified his general words. Froude's account of
Becket's appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, his
scruples, and how he overcame them, is described by Freeman as "pure
fiction." It was taken from William of Canterbury, and, though open
to doubt upon some points, is quite as likely to be true as the
narrative preferred by Freeman. The most serious error, indeed the
only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement
that Becket's murderers were shielded from punishment by the King.
Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be
tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop. It is
doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the
Constitutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of
Becket's assassination, abolished clerical privileges altogether.
Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly
wrong.

But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with
speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce. He
stooped to write the words, "Natural kindliness, if no other feeling,
might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work
of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a
brother's almost forgotten fame." The meaning of this sentence, so
far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment
on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends
published after his own premature death. If Froude had written
anonymously against this work, the phrase "stabs in the dark" would
have been intelligible. As he had written in his own name, and had
not mentioned his brother's work at all, part at least of the
accusation was transparently and obviously false.

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