The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

H >> Herbert Paul >> The Life of Froude

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25

--
* Short Studies, vol. ii. p. 241.
--

That O'Connell wasted much time in clamouring for Repeal is perfectly
true. But he was as much the author of Catholic Emancipation as
Cobden was the author of Free Trade, and that fact alone should have
debarred Froude from the use of this extravagant language. For though
an article in Fraser's Magazine is a very different thing from a
serious history, print imposes some obligations, and even two or
three casual sentences may show the bent of a man's mind. Whatever
Froude wrote on Ireland, or on anything else, was sure to be widely
read, and to affect, for good or for evil, the opinion of the British
public. It was therefore peculiarly incumbent on him not to flatter
English pride by wounding Irish self-respect.

While Froude was writing his English in Ireland he received an
invitation to give a series of lectures in the United States. "The
Yankees," he says to Skelton,+ "have written to me about going over
to lecture to them. I am strongly tempted; but I could not tell the
truth about Ireland without reflecting in a good many ways on my own
country. I don't fancy doing that, however justly, to amuse Jonathan."
These words certainly do not show implacable bitterness
against Ireland. Brought face to face with responsibility, Froude
always felt the weight of it, and he was never consciously unfair. He
was under a strong sense of obligation, which he felt bound to
fulfil. It is impossible not to admire the chivalrous and intrepid
spirit with which he undertook singlehanded to justify the conduct of
his countrymen before the American people, and to persuade them that
England had provocation for her treatment of Ireland. Once convinced
that his cause was righteous, he never flinched. He believed that
false views of the Irish question prevailed in America, and that he
could set them right. He did not altogether underrate the magnitude
of the enterprise. "I go like an Arab of the desert," he wrote to
Skelton a little later: "my hand will be against every man, and
therefore every man's hand will be against me."* A belief in
Ireland's wrongs was part of the American creed, like the
faithlessness of Charles II. and the tyranny of George III. Irish
Americans had enormous influence at elections, in Congress, and in
the newspapers. Released Fenians, O'Donovan Rossa among them, had
been spreading what they called the light, and their own countrymen
at all events believed what they said. The American people as a whole
were not unfriendly to England. The Alabama Arbitration and the Geneva
Award had destroyed the ill feeling that remained after the
fall of Richmond. But it was not worth the while of any American
politician to alienate the Irish vote, and most Americans honestly
thought, not without reason, that the policy of England in Ireland
had been abominable. To let sleeping dogs lie might be wise. Once
they were unchained, no American hand would help to chain them up
again. Froude, however, conceived that circumstances were unusually
favourable. The Irish Church had been disestablished, and the Fenian
prisoners had been set free. The Irish Land Act of 1870 had
recognised the Irish tenant's right to a partnership in the soil.
Although Froude had no sympathy, ecclesiastical or political, with
Gladstone, he did think that the Land Act was a just and beneficent
measure from which good would come. In the firm belief that he could
vindicate the statesmanship of his own country before American
audiences without sacrificing the paramount claims of truth and
justice, he accepted the invitation.

--
+ Table Talk of Shirley, p. 149.
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 151.
--

After a summer cruise in a big schooner with his friend Lord Ducie,
whose hospitality at sea he often in coming years enjoyed, Froude
sailed from Liverpool in the Russia at the end of September, 1872,
with the distinguished physicist John Tyndall. He was a good sailor,
and loved a voyage. In his first letter to his wife from American
soil he describes a storm with the delight of a schoolboy.
"On Saturday morning it blew so hard that it was scarcely possible to
stand on deck. The wind and waves dead ahead, and the whole power of
the engines only just able to move the ship against it. It was the
grandest sight I ever witnessed--the splendid Russia, steady as if
she were on a railway, holding her straight course without yielding
one point to the sea--up the long hill-sides of the waves and down
into the troughs--the crests of the sea all round as far as the eye
could reach in one wild whirl of foam and spray. It was worth coming
into the Atlantic to see--with the sense all the time of perfect
security."

Froude's visit was in one respect well timed. President Grant had
just been assured of his second term, and even politicians had
leisure to think of their famous guest. He was at once invited to a
great banquet in New York, and found himself lodged with sumptuous
hospitality in a luxurious hotel at the expense of the Bureau which
had organised the lectures. One newspaper quaintly described him as
"looking like a Scotch farmer, with an open frank face and calm mild
eyes." His History was well known, for the Scribners had sold a
hundred and fifty thousand copies. His opinions were of course freely
invited, and he did not hesitate to give them. "I talk much Toryism
to them all, and ridicule the idea of England's decay, or of our
being in any danger of revolution; and with Colonies and India and
Commerce, etc., I insist that we are just as big as they are, and
have just as large a future before us." Both Froude and his hosts
might have remembered with advantage Disraeli's fine saying that
great nations are those which produce great men. But the sensual
idolatry of mere size is almost equally common on both sides of the
Atlantic.

The banquet was given by Froude's American publishers, the Scribners,
and his old acquaintance Emerson was one of the company. Another was
a popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, and a third was the present
Ambassador of the United States in London, Mr. Whitelaw Reid. In his
speech Froude referred to the object of his visit. He had heard at
home that "one of the most prominent Fenian leaders," O'Donovan
Rossa, "was making a tour in the United States, dilating upon English
tyranny and the wrongs of Ireland." That Froude should cross the seas
to confute O'Donovan Rossa must have struck the audience as scarcely
credible, until he explained his mission, for as such he regarded it,
by asserting that "the judgment of America has more weight in Ireland
than twenty batteries of English cannon." When the Irish had the
management of their own affairs, he continued, the result was
universal misery. They could not govern themselves in the sixteenth
century; therefore they could not govern themselves in the
nineteenth. If American opinion would only tell the Irish that they
had no longer any grievances which legislation could redress, the
Irish would believe it, and all would be well.

Though courteously treated as a representative Englishman, Froude had
of course no official position, and he hoped that as a private
individual his voice might be heard. But, while there were thousands
of native Americans who had no love for their Irish fellow-citizens,
there were very few indeed who cared to take up England's case
against Ireland. The Democratic party were inclined to sympathise
with Home Rule as being a mild form of Secession, and the Republican
party did not see why Ireland should be refused the qualified
independence enjoyed by every State of the Union. In these
unfavourable circumstances Froude delivered his first lecture. He
made a good point when he described the Irish peasant in Munster or
Connaught looking to America as his natural protector. "There is not
a lad," he exclaimed, "in an Irish national school who does not pore
over the maps of the States which hang on the walls, gaze on them
with admiration and hope, and count the years till he too shall set
his foot in those famous cities which float before his imagination
like the gardens of Aladdin." Nevertheless he asked his hearers and
readers to take it from him that Ireland had no longer any good
ground of complaint against the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Independence she could not have, and that not because the interests
of Great Britain forbade it, which would have been an intelligible
argument, but because she was unfit for it herself.

"If I were to sum up in one sentence the secret of Ireland's
misfortunes, I should say it lay in this: that while from the first
she has resisted England, complained of England, appealed to heaven
and earth against the wrongs which England has inflicted on her, she
has ever invited others to help her, and has never herself made an
effective fight for her own rights .... A majority of hustings votes
might be found for a separation. The majority would be less
considerable if instead of a voting-paper they were called to handle
a rifle."

To tell Irishmen that they could obtain liberty by fighting for it,
and would never get it in any other way, was not likely to conciliate
them, or to promote the cause of peace. Froude's appeal to American
opinion, however, was more practical.

"The Irishman requires to be ruled, but ruled as all men ought to be,
by the laws of right and wrong, laws which shall defend the weak from
the strong and the poor from the rich. When the poor peasant is
secured the reward of his own labour, and is no longer driven to the
blunderbuss to save himself and his family from legalised robbery, if
he prove incorrigible then, I will give him up. But the experiment
remains to be made."

An example had been set by Gladstone in the Land Act, and that was
the path which further legislation ought to follow. So far there
would not be much disagreement between Froude and most Irish
Americans. Rack-renting upon the tenants' improvements was the bane
of Irish agriculture, and the Act of 1870 was precisely what Froude
described it, a partial antidote. Then the lecturer reverted to
ancient history, to the Annals of the Four Masters, and the Danish
invasion. The audience found it rather long, and rather dull, even
though Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick were all built
by the Danes. But a foundation had to be laid, and Froude felt bound
also to make it clear that he did not take the old Whig view of
Government as a necessary evil, or swear by the "dismal science" of
Adam Smith.

He concluded his first lecture in words which at once defined his
position and challenged the whole Irish race. "It was not tyranny,"
he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English
authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving
Ireland to herself which she demands so passionately that was the
cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that
he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that
the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for
instruction, but to look out for mistakes. An article in The New York
Tribune, which spoke of Froude with admiration and esteem, told him
plainly enough how it would be. "We have had historical lecturers
before, but never any who essayed with such industry, learning, and
eloquence to convince a nation that its sympathies for half a century
at least have have been misplaced .... The thesis which he only
partly set out for the night--that the misfortunes of Ireland are
rather due to the congenital qualities of the race than to wrongs
inflicted by their conquerors--will excite earnest and perhaps bitter
controversy." This prediction was abundantly fulfilled, and the
controversy spoiled the tour. A friendly and sympathetic journalist
questioned Froude's "wisdom in coming before our people with this
course of lectures on Irish history ... We do not care for the
domestic troubles of other nations, and it is a piece of impertinence
to thrust them upon our attention. Mr. Froude knows perfectly well
that England would resent, and rightfully, the least interference on
our part with her Irish policy or her Irish subjects."

In this criticism there is a large amount of common sense, and
Froude would have done well to think of it before. He was not,
however, a man to be put down by clamour; he was sustained by the
fervour of his convictions, and it was too late for remonstrance.
His lectures had all been carefully prepared, and he went steadily
on with them. The unusual charge of dullness, which had been made
against some passages in his opening discourse, was never made
again. The lectures became a leading topic of conversation, and a
subject of fierce attack. Without fear, and in defiance of his
critics, he dashed into the reign of Henry VIII., "the English Blue
Beard, whom I have been accused of attempting to whitewash." "I
have no particular veneration for kings," he said. "The English
Liturgy speaks of them officially as most religious and gracious.
They have been, I suppose, as religious and gracious as other men,
neither more nor less. The chief difference is that we know more of
kings than we know of other men." Henry had a short way with
absentees. He took away their Irish estates, "and gave them to
others who would reside and attend to their work. It would have been
confiscation doubtless," beyond the power of American Congress,
though not of a British Parliament. "If in later times there had
been more such confiscations, Ireland would not have been the worse
for it." Here, then, Froude was on the side of the Irish. Here, as
always, he was under the influence of Carlyle. His ideal form of
government was an enlightened despotism, with a ruler drawn after
the pattern of children's story-books, who would punish the wicked
and reward the good. Froude never consciously defended injustice, or
tampered with the truth. His faults were of the opposite kind. He
could not help speaking out the whole truth as it appeared to him,
without regard for time, place, or expediency. If he could have
defended England without attacking Ireland, all would have been
well, but he could not do it. For his defence of England, stated
simply, was that Ireland had always been, and still remained,
incapable of managing her own affairs. "Free nations, gentlemen, are
not made by playing at insurrection. If Ireland desires to be a
nation, she must learn not merely to shout for liberty, but to fight
for it" against a bigger nation with a standing army in which many
Irishmen were enlisted. The Irish are a sensitive as well as a
generous race; and they feel taunts as much as more substantial
wrongs. When the first British statesman of his time, not a Roman
Catholic, nor, as the Irish would have said, a Catholic at all, had
denounced the upas, or poison, tree of Protestant ascendency, and
had cut off its two principal branches, Froude wasted his breath in
telling the American Irish, or the American people, that Gladstone
did not know what he was talking about. The Irish Church Act, the
Irish Land Act, the release of the Fenians, appealed to them as
honest measures of justice and conciliation. There was nothing
conciliatory in Froude's language, and they did not think it just.
From the purely historical point of view he had much to say for
himself, as, for instance:

"The Papal cause in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all
in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons,
and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in
Ireland it assumed the accidental form of the defence of the freedom
of opinion."

Perhaps not. Ireland, for good or for evil, was connected with
England, and when England was at war with the Pope she was at war
with him in Ireland as elsewhere. The argument, however, is double-
edged. The Papal cause being no longer, for various reasons, the
cause of stake and gibbet, how could there be the same ground for
restricting freedom of opinion in Ireland, for passing Coercion
Acts, for refusing Home Rule? As Froude himself said, "Popery now
has its teeth drawn. It can bark, but it can no longer bite." "The
Irish generally," he went on, "were rather superstitious than
religious." These. are delicate distinctions. "The Bishop of
Peterborough must understand," said John Bright on a famous
occasion, "that I believe in holy earth as little as he believes in
holy water." Elizabeth's Irish policy was to take advantage of local
factions, and to maintain English supremacy by setting them against
each other. "The result was hideous. The forty-five glorious years
of Elizabeth were to Ireland years of unremitting wretchedness."
Nobody could complain that Froude spared the English Government. If
he had been writing history, or rather when he was writing it, the
mutual treachery of the Irish could not be passed over. "Alas and
shame for Ireland," said Froude in New York. "Not then only, but
many times before and after, the same plan [offer of pardon to
murderous traitors] was tried, and was never known to fail. Brother
brought in the dripping head of brother, son of father, comrade of
comrade. I pardon none, said an English commander, until they have
imbued their hands in blood." The revival of such horrors on a
public platform could serve no useful purpose. They could not be
pleaded as an apology for England, and they inflamed, instead of
soothing, the animosities which Froude professed himself anxious to
allay. Yet he never lost sight of justice. On Elizabeth he had no
mercy. He made her responsible for the slaughter of men, women, and
children by her officers, for first neglecting her duties as ruler,
and then putting down rebellion by assassination. The plantation of
Ulster by 'James I., and the accompanying forfeiture of Catholic
estates, he defended on the ground that only the idle rich were
dispossessed. This is of course socialism pure and simple. James
I.'s own excuse was that Tyrone and Tyrconnell, who owned the
greater part of Ulster between them, had been implicated in the
Gunpowder Plot. If they were, the loss of their lands was a very
mild penalty indeed.

On the rebellion of 1641, which led to Cromwell's terrible
retribution, Froude touched lightly. Although the number of
Protestants who perished in the massacre has been exaggerated, the
attempts of Catholic historians to deny it, or explain it away, are
futile. Sir William Petty's figure of 38,000 is as well
authenticated as any. Froude of course justifies Cromwell for
putting, eight years afterwards, the garrisons of Drogheda and
Wexford to the sword. His characteristic intrepidity was never more
fully shown than in these appeals to American opinion against the
Irish race and creed. Unfortunately the practical result of them was
the reverse of what he intended. He preached the gospel of force.
Thus he expressed it in reply to Cromwell's critics: "I say frankly,
that I believe the control of human things in this world is given to
the strong, and those who cannot hold their own ground with all
advantage on their side must bear the Consequences of their
weakness." The Holy Inquisition, might have used this language in
Italy or in Spain. Any tyrant might use it at any time. It was
denied in anticipation by an older and higher authority than Carlyle
in the words "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to
the strong." There is a better morality, if indeed there be a worse,
than reverence for big battalions.

Sceptre and crown
Must topple down,
And in the earth be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade;

Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

Froude seldom did things by halves, and his apology for Cromwell is
not half-hearted. He applauds the celebrated pronouncement, "I
meddle with no man's conscience; but if you mean by liberty of
conscience, liberty to have the mass, that will not be suffered
where the Parliament of England has power." A great deal has
happened since Cromwell's time, and the mass is no longer the symbol
of intolerance, if only because the Church of Rome has no power to
persecute. Cromwell would have had a short shrift if he had fallen
into the hands of mass-goers. To tolerate intolerance is a Christian
duty, and therefore possible for an individual. Whether it was
possible for the Lord General in 1650 is a question hardly suited
for popular treatment on a public platform. All that he did was
right in Froude's eyes, including the prescription of "Hell or
Connaught" for "the men whose trade was fighting, who had called
themselves lords of the soil," and the abolition of the Irish
Parliament. "I as an Englishman," said Froude, "honour Cromwell and
glory in him as the greatest statesman and soldier our race has
produced. In the matter we have now in hand I consider him to have
been the best friend, in the best sense, to all that was good in
Ireland." This is of course an opinion which can honestly be held.
But to the Irish race all over the world such language is an
irritating defiance, and they simply would not listen to any man who
used it.

The expulsion of Presbyterians under Charles II. was foolish as well
as cruel, for it deprived the English Government in Ireland of their
best friends, and supplied the American colonies with some of their
staunchest soldiers in the War of Independence. Enough were left,
however, to immortalise the siege of Derry, while the native Irish
failed to distinguish themselves, or, in plain English, ran away, at
the Battle of the Boyne, and the defeat of James II. was recognised
by the Treaty of Limerick. An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was
accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under
Charles II. The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the
episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and
forcible terms by Froude. Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his
vigilant eye. "I believe," he said, "Bishops have produced more
mischief in this world than any class of officials that have ever
been invented." The petition of the Irish Parliament for union with
England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought;
Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the
commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that
smuggling thrived better than any other trade. The country was
pillaged by absent landlords, and "the mere hint of an absentee tax
was sufficient to throw the younger Pitt into convulsions." The
Irish Protestant Bishops provoked the savage satire of Swift, who
doubted not that excellent men had been appointed, and only deplored
that they should be personated by scoundrels who had murdered them
on Hounslow Heath.

These lectures stung the Irish to the quick, and gave much
embarrassment to Froude's American friends. The Irish found a
powerful champion in Father Burke, the Dominican friar, who had been
a popular preacher at Rome, and with an audience of his own Catholic
countrymen was irresistible. Burke was not a well informed man, and
his knowledge of history was derived from Catholic handbooks. But
the occasion did not call for dry facts. Froude had not been
passionless, and what the Irish wanted in reply was the rhetorical
eloquence which to the Father was second nature. Burke, however, had
the good taste and good sense to acknowledge that Froude suffered
from nothing worse than the invincible prejudice which all Catholics
attribute to all Protestants. As a Protestant and an Englishman,
Froude could not be expected to give such a history of Ireland as
would be agreeable to Irishmen. "Yet to the honour of this learned
gentleman be it said that he frankly avows the injuries which have
been done, and that he comes nearer than any man whom I have ever
heard to the real root of the remedy to be applied to these evils."
When his handling of documentary evidence was criticised, Froude
repeated his challenge to the editor of The Saturday Review, which
had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of
fair play gave judgment in his favour. But how was public opinion to
pronounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian II.,
granting Ireland to Henry II of England? The Bull was not in
existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all.
Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by
later Bulls of succeeding Popes. The matter had no interest for
Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore. Burke had
more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian massacres
of Such 1649. Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a
single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter
of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked
upon heretics. The combat was not so much unequal as impossible. There
was no common groud. Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if
he were a Protestant. His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted
alike for its eloquence and its justice. "In those singular labyrinths
of intrigue and treachery," meaning the secret correspondence at the
Castle, "I have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in
patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and
scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the
reputation of Henry Grattan. I say nothing of the temptations to which
he was exposed. There were no honours with which England would not
have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not
have paid to have silenced or subsidised him. He was one of those
perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind.
They passed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to
turn his back on them. In every step of his life he was governed
simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his
country." Grattan's Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a
dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion
of 1798. It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever
sat within its walls. Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by
the "delirium of nationality," and the true Irish statesman of his
time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, whose name is only less
abhorred by Irish Nationalists than Cromwell's own. Americans did not
think nationality a delirium, and their ideal of statesmanship was not
represented by Lord Clare.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25