The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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* English in Ireland, iii. 336.
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It is no disqualification for an historian to hold definite views,
which, if he holds them, it must surely be his duty to express. The
fault of The English in Ireland is to overstate the case, to make it
appear that there was no ground for rebellion in 1798, and no
objection to union in 1800. The whole book is written on the
supposition that the Irish are an inferior race and Catholicism an
inferior religion. So far as religion was concerned, Lecky did not
disagree with Froude. But either because he was an Irishman, or
because he had a judicial mind, he could see the necessity of
understanding what Irish Catholics aimed at before passing judgment
upon them. Froude could never get out of his mind the approval of
treason and assassination to which in the sixteenth century the
Vatican was committed. It may be fascinating polemics to taunt the
Church of Rome with being "always the same." But as a matter of fact
the Church is not the same. It improves with the general march of
the progress that it condemns. Froude fairly and honourably quotes a
crucial instance. Pitt "sought the opinion of the Universities of
France and Spain on the charge generally alleged against Catholics
that their allegiance to their sovereign was subordinate to their
allegiance to the Pope; that they held that heretics might lawfully
be put to death, and that no faith was to be kept with them. The
Universities had unanimously disavowed doctrines which they declared
at once inhuman and unchristian, and on the strength of the
disavowal the British Parliament repealed the Penal Acts of William
for England and Scotland, restored to the Catholics the free use of
their chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy." Toleration
was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and
complete emancipation might have followed but for the interference
of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.

To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund
Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere.
In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules
Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own
death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially
independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters
of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a
word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland
has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a
Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have
been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood
in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it
furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than
anything else in the world. He even denied that there was such a
thing as the Protestant religion. The difference between
Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a
negative no religion could be made. To persecute people for
believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them
for believing too little. Protestant ascendency was social
ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it.
Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablishing the Irish
Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments. He would have been
satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded.
Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an
illustrious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an
almost fanatical enemy of revolution.

Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an
opinion. He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his
conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of
his birth. He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a
firm supporter of her connection with the State. But his wife was a
Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect.
For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was associated, he
felt a passionate hatred of which he has left a monument more
durable than brass in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and
the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He worshipped the British
Constitution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had
been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a
pension from the king. The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with
Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it
did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour. That Burke
should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he
lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circumstance, But it
is a circumstance which entitles him to peculiar attention from the
Irish historian. Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists. Their
hero was his critic, Tom Paine. Yet Froude says that when Burke
"took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain
which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference
became infinitely mischievous."* As a matter of fact, his
interference after 1789 had no result at all. So far as the French
Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than
ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was
to deter them from Revolutionary methods.

--
* English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215.
--

But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be
trusted. If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the
name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he
would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a
just interpreter of events. Froude looked at the rebellion and the
Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange
manifesto. Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an
unusually eloquent specimen of its class; but they are not history,
any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of
Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what
the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said
that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union.
Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons. He had
been elected in 1790 against the "patriot" Ponsonby, and was opposed
to the Catholic franchise in 1793. He was a man of unblemished
character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk
nonsense. Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked.
Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is
disregarded. "All that was best and noblest in Ireland" was gathered
into the Orange Association, which has been the plague of every
Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of
Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a
Catholic country "a sharp eye should be kept on Papists," and would
doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an
Irishman and a subject. The English in Ireland is reported to have
been Parnell's favourite book. It made him, he said, a Home Ruler
because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government. This
was not Froude's principal object, but the testimony to his
truthfulness is all the more striking on that account. Gladstone,
who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land
Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the "truth and honour"
of the writer.

If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the
Catholic faith is a degrading superstition, and that Ireland is only
saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book
deserves little but praise. Although he did not study for it as he
studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number
of State Papers, with a great mass of official correspondence.
Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as
Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London. But the
scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed
themselves in his mind before he began. He was to vindicate the
Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he
vindicated it. If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards,
Froude assumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of
original sin. He always found in them enough vice to account for any
persecution of which they might be the victims. Just as he could not
write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to
O'Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the
leaders of Irish opinion. They might be Protestants themselves; but
they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough. It was
enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude's historical
reputation is to attack Carlyle's. "I have read," Carlyle wrote on
the 20th of June, 1874, "all your book carefully over again, and
continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than
ever: a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with
advantage; and the want of a copious, carefully weighed concluding
chapter is more sensible to me than ever; but the substance of the
book is genuine truth, and the utterance of it is clear, sharp,
smiting, and decisive, like a shining Damascus sabre; I never
doubted or doubt but its effect will be great and lasting. No
criticism have I seen since you went away that was worth notice.
Poor Lecky is weak as water--bilge-water with a drop of formic acid
in it: unfortunate Lecky, he is wedded to his Irish idols; let him
alone." The reference to Lecky, as unfair as it is amusing, was
provoked by a review of Froude in Macmillan's Magazine. There are
worse idols than Burke, or even Grattan, and Lecky was an Irishman
after all.

A very different critic from Carlyle expressed an equally favourable
opinion.

"I have an interesting letter," Froude wrote to his friend Lady
Derby, formerly Lady Salisbury, "from Bancroft the historian
(American minister at Berlin) on the Irish book. He, I am happy to
say, accepts the view which I wished to impress on the Americans,
and he has sent me some curious correspondence from the French
Foreign Office illustrating and confirming one of my points. One
evening last summer I met Lady Salisbury,* and told her my opinion
of Lord Clare. She dissented with characteristic emphasis--and she
is not a lady who can easily be moved from her judgments. Still, if
she finds time to read the book I should like to hear that she can
recognise the merits as well as the demerits of a statesman who, in
the former at least, so nearly resembled her husband."

--
* The wife of the late Prime Minister.
--

In another letter he says:

"The meaning of the book as a whole is to show to what comes of forcing
uncongenial institutions on a country to which they are unsuited.
If we had governed Ireland as we govern India, there would have been
no confiscation, no persecution of religion, and consequently none
of the reasons for disloyalty. Having chosen to set Parliament and
an Established Church, and to the lands of the old owners, we left
nothing undone to spoil the chances of success with the experiment."

Froude went to the United States with no very exalted opinion of the
Irish; he returned with the lowest possible. "Like all Irish
patriots," including Grattan, Wolfe Tone "would have accepted
greedily any tolerable appointment from the Government which he had
been execrating." The subsequent history of Ireland has scarcely
justified this sweeping invective. "There are persons who believe
that if the king had not interfered with Lord Fitzwilliam, the Irish
Catholics would have accepted gratefully the religious equality
which he was prepared to offer them, and would have remained
thenceforward for all time contented citizens of the British
Empire." So reasonable a theory requires more convincing refutation
than a simple statement that it is "incredible." Incredible, no
doubt, if the Catholics of Ireland were wild beasts, cringing under
the whip, ferocious when released from restraint. Very credible
indeed if Irish Catholics in 1795 were like other people, asking for
justice, and not expecting an impossible ascendency. Interesting as
Froude's narrative is, it becomes, when read together with Lecky's,
more interesting still. Though indignant with Froude's aspersions
upon the Irish race, Lecky did not allow himself to be hurried. He
was writing a history of England as well as of Ireland, and the
Irish chapters had to wait their turn. In Froude's book there are
signs of haste; in Lecky's there are none. Without the brilliancy
and the eloquence which distinguished Froude, Lecky had a power of
marshalling facts that gave to each of them its proper value. No
human being is without prejudice. But Lecky was curiously unlike the
typical Irishman of Froude's imagination. He has written what is by
general acknowledgment the fairest account of the Irish rebellion,
and of the Union to which it led. Of the eight volumes which compose
his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, two, the seventh
and eighth, are devoted exclusively to Ireland.

After the publication of his first two volumes he made no direct
reference to Froude, and contented himself with his own independent
narrative. He vindicated the conduct of Lord Fitzwilliam, and traced
to his recall in 1795 the desperate courses adopted by Irish
Catholics. He showed that Froude had been unjust to the Whigs who
gave evidence for Arthur O'Connor at Maidstone in 1798, and
especially to Grattan. That O'Connor was engaged in treasonable
correspondence with France there can be no doubt now. But he did not
tell his secrets to his Whig friends, and what Grattan said of his
never having heard O'Connor talk about a French invasion was
undoubtedly true.* Froude's hatred of the English Whigs almost
equalled his contempt for the Irish Catholics, and the two feelings
prevented him from writing anything like an narrative either of the
rebellion or of the Union. No other book of his shows such evident
traces of having been written under the influence of Carlyle.
Carlyle's horror of democracy, worship of force, his belief that
martial law was the law of Almighty God, and that cruelty might
always be perpetrated on the right side, are conspicuously displayed.
If Froude spoke of the Roman Catholic Church, he always seemed to
fancy himself back in the sixteenth century, when the murder of
Protestants was regarded at the Vatican as justifiable. The Irish
rebellion of 1798 was led by Protestants, like Lord Edward Fitzgerald,
and free thinkers, like Wolfe Tone. But for the recall of Lord
Fitzwilliam, the Catholics would have taken no part in it, and it
would not have been more dangerous than the rebellion of 1848. Such
at least was Lecky's opinion, supported by weighty arguments, and by
facts which cannot be denied. If Froude's reputation as an historian
depended upon his English in Ireland, it certainly would not stand
high. Of course he had as much right to put the English case as
Father Burke had to put the Irish one. But his responsibility was far
greater, and his splendid talents might have been better employed
than in reviving the mutual animosities of religion or of race.

--
* See Froude's English in Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 320, 321;
Lecky's History of England, vol. viii. p. 52.
--

When Lecky reviewed, with much critical asperity, the last two
volumes of Froude's English in Ireland for Macmillan's Magazine* he
referred to Home Rule as a moderate and constitutional movement. His
own History was not completed till 1890. But when Gladstone
introduced his first Home Rule Bill, in 1886, Lecky opposed it as
strongly as Froude himself. Lecky was quite logical, for the
question whether the Union had been wisely or legitimately carried
had very little to do with the expedience of repealing it. Fieri non
debuit, factum valet, may be common sense as well as good law. But
Froude was not unnaturally triumphant to find his old antagonist in
Irish matters on his side, especially as Freeman was a Home Ruler.
Froude's attitude was never for a moment doubtful. He had always
held that the Irish people were quite unfitted for self-government,
and of all English statesmen Gladstone was the one he trusted least.
He had a theory that great orators were always wrong, even when,
like Pitt and Fox, they were on opposite sides. Gladstone he doubly
repudiated as a High Churchman and a Democrat. Yet, with more
candour than consistency, he always declared that Gladstone was the
English statesman who best understood the Irish Land Question, and
so he plainly told the Liberal Unionists, speaking as one of
themselves. He had praised Henry VIII for confiscating the Irish
estates of absentees, and taunted Pitt with his unreasoning horror
of an absentee tax. He would have given the Irish people almost
everything rather than allow them to do anything for themselves. In
1880 he brought out another edition of his Irish book, with a new
chapter on the crisis. The intervening years had made no difference
in his estimate of Ireland, or of Irishmen. O'Connell, who had
nothing to do with the politics of the eighteenth century, was "not
sincere about repeal," although he "forced the Whigs to give him
whatever he might please to ask for,"+ and he certainly asked for
that.

--
* June, 1874.
+ English in Ireland, 1881, vol. iii. p. 568.
--

That Catholic emancipation was useless and mischievous, Froude never
ceased to declare. He would have dragooned the Irish into
Protestantism and made the three Catholic provinces into a Crown
colony. The Irish establishment he regretted as a badge of
Protestant ascendency. But he was a dangerous ally for Unionists.
That the government of Ireland by what he called a Protestant
Parliament sitting at Westminister, meaning the Parliament of the
United Kingdom, had failed, he not merely admitted, but loudly
proclaimed. It had failed "more signally, and more disgracefully,"
than any other system, because Gladstone admitted that Fenian
outrages precipitated legislative reforms. The alternative was to
rule Ireland, or let her be free, and altogether separate from Great
Britain. Neither branch of the supposed alternative was within the
range of practical politics. But on one point Froude unconsciously
anticipated the immediate future. "The remedy" for the agrarian
troubles of Ireland was, he said, "the establishment of courts to
which the tenant might appeal." The ink of this sentence was
scarcely dry when the Irish Land Bill of 1881 appeared with that
very provision. Froude was always ready and willing to promote the
material benefit of Ireland. Irishmen, except the Protestant
population of Ulster, were children to be treated with firmness and
kindness, the truest kindness being never to let them have their own
way.

CHAPTER VII

SOUTH AFRICA

Before Froude had written the last chapter of The English in Ireland
he was visited by the greatest sorrow of his life. Mrs. Froude died
suddenly in February, 1874. It had been a perfect marriage, and he
never enjoyed the same happiness afterwards. Carlyle and his
faithful friend Fitzjames Stephen were the only persons he could see
at first, though he manfully completed the book on which he was
engaged. It was long before he rallied from the shock, and he felt
as if he could never write again. He dreaded "the length of years
which might yet lie ahead of him before he could have his discharge
from service." He took a melancholy pride in noting that none of the
reviewers discovered any special defects in those final pages of his
book which had been written under such terrible conditions. Mrs.
Froude had thoroughly understood all her husband's moods, and her
quiet humour always cheered him in those hours of gloom from which a
man of his sensitive nature could not escape. She could use a gentle
mockery which was always effective, along with her common sense, in
bringing out the true proportions of things. Conscious as she was of
his social brilliancy and success, she would often tell the children
that they lost nothing by not going out with him, because their
father talked better at home than he talked anywhere else. Her deep
personal religion was the form of belief with which he had most
sympathy, and which he best understood, regarding it as the
foundation of virtue and conduct and honour and truth. He attended
with her the services of the Church, which satisfied him whenever
they were performed with the reverent simplicity familiar to his
boyhood. Happily he was not left alone. He had two young children to
love, and his eldest daughter was able to take her stepmother's
place as mistress of his house. With the children he left London as
soon as he could, and tried to occupy his mind by reading to them
from Don Quixote, or, on a Sunday, from The Pilgrim's Progress. To
the end of his life he felt his loss; and when he was offered,
fifteen years later, the chance of going back to his beloved
Derreen, he shrank from the associations it would have recalled.

He took a house for his family in Wales, which he described in the
following letter to Lady Derby:

"CROGAN HOUSE, Corwen, June 3rd, 1874.

"I do not know if I told you upon what a curious and interesting old
place we have fallen for our retirement. The walls of the room in which
I am writing are five feet thick. The old part of the house
must have been an Abbey Grange; the cellars run into a British
tumulus, the oaks in the grounds must many of them be as old as the
Conquest, and the site of the parish church was a place of
pilgrimage probably before Christianity. Stone coffins are turned
over on the hillsides in making modern improvements. Denfil Gadenis'
(the mediaeval Welsh saint's) wooden horn still stands in the church
porch, and the sense of strangeness and antiquity is the more
palpable because hardly a creature in the valley, except the cows
and the birds, speak in a language familiar to me. It was Owen
Glendower's country. Owen himself doubtless has many times ridden
down the avenue. We are in the very heart of Welsh nationality,
which was always a respectable thing--far more so than the Celticism
of the Gaels and Irish. We are apt to forget that the Tudors were
Welsh." Fortunately a plan suggested itself which gave him variety
of occupation and change of scene. Disraeli's Government had just
come into office, and with the Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon,
Froude was on intimate terms. Froude had always been interested in
the Colonies, and was an advocate of Federation long before it had
become a popular scheme. As early as 1870 he wrote to Skelton:

"Gladstone and Co. deliberately intend to shake off the Colonies.
They are privately using their command of the situation to make the
separation inevitable."* I do not know what this means. Lord
Dufferin has left it on record that after his appointment to Canada
in 1872 Lowe came up to him at the club, and said, "Now, you ought
to make it your business to get rid of the Dominion." But Lowe was
in the habit of saying paradoxical things, and it was Disraeli, not
Gladstone, who spoke of the Colonies as millstones round our necks.
Cardwell, the Secretary for War, withdrew British troops from Canada
and New Zealand, holding that the self-governing Colonies should be
responsible for their own defence. That wise policy fostered union
rather than separation, by providing that the working classes at
home should not be taxed for the benefit of their colonial fellow-
subjects. Lord Carnarvon himself had passed in 1867 the Bill which
federated Canada and which his Liberal predecessor had drawn. He was
now anxious to carry out a similar scheme in South Africa, and
Froude offered to find out for him how the land lay. His visit was
not to be in any sense official. He would be ostensibly travelling
for his health, which was always set up by a voyage. He was
interested in extending to South Africa Miss Rye's benevolent plans
of emigration to Canada; in the treatment of a Kaffir chief called
Langalibalele; and in the disputes which had arisen from the
annexation of the Diamond Fields. Thus there were reasons for his
trip enough and to spare. He would, it was thought, be more likely
to obtain accurate information if the principal purpose of his visit
were kept in the background.

--
*Table Talk of Shirley, p. 142.
--

There was one great and fundamental difference between the case of
Canada and the case of South Africa. Canada had itself asked for
federation, and Parliament simply gave effect to the wish of the
Canadians. Opinion in South Africa was notoriously divided, and the
centre of opposition was at Cape Town. Natal had not yet obtained a
full measure of self-government, and the lieutenant-Governor, Sir
Benjamin Pine, had excited indignation among all friends of the
natives by arbitrary imprisonment, after a mock trial, of a Kaffir
chief. Lord Carnarvon had carefully to consider this case, and also
to decide whether the mixed Constitution of Natal, which would not
work, should be reformed or annulled. A still more serious
difficulty was connected with the Diamond Fields, officially known
as Griqualand West. The ownership of this district had been disputed
between the Orange Free State and a native chief called Nicholas
Waterboer. In 1872 Lord Kimberley, as Secretary of State for the
Colonies, had purchased it from Waterboer at a price ludicrously
small in proportion to its value, and it had since been annexed to
the British dominions by the Governor, Sir Henry Barkly. Waterboer,
who knew nothing about the value of money, was satisfied. The Orange
State vehemently protested, and President Brand denounced the annexation
as a breach of faith. Not only, he said, were the Diamond
Fields within the limits of his Republic; the agreement between
Waterboer and the Secretary of State was itself a breach of the
Orange River Convention, by which Great Britain undertook not to
negotiate with any native chief north of the River Vaal. Lord
Kimberley paid no heed to Brand's remonstrances. He denied
altogether the validity of the Dutch claim, and he would not hear of
arbitration. By the time that Lord Carnarvon came into office
thousands of British settlers were digging for diamonds in
Griqualand West, and its abandonment was impossible. Brand himself
did not wish to take the responsibility of governing it. But he
continued to press the case for compensation, and the British
Government, which had forced independence upon the Boers, appeared
in the invidious light of shirking responsibility while grasping at
mineral wealth. If it had not been for this untoward incident, the
Dutch Republics would have been more favourable to Lord Carnarvon's
policy than Cape Colony was. The Transvaal was imperfectly protected
against the formidable power of the Zulus, and a general rising of
blacks against whites was the real danger which threatened South
Africa.

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