The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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Froude had now completed the first part of his great History. The
second part, the reign of Elizabeth, was reserved for future issue
in separately numbered volumes. The death of Macaulay in December,
1859, left Froude the most famous of living English historians, and
the ugly duckling of the brood had become the glory of the family.
The reception of his first six volumes was a curious one. The
general public read, and admired. The few critics who were competent
to form an instructed and impartial opinion perceived that, while
there were errors in detail, the story of the English Reformation,
and of the Catholic reaction which followed it, had been for the
first time thoroughly told. Many years afterwards Froude said to
Tennyson that the most essential quality in an historian was
imagination. This true and profound remark is peculiarly liable to
be misunderstood. People who do not know what imagination means are
apt to confound it with invention, although the latter quality is
really the last resort of those who are destitute of the former.
Froude was an ardent lover of the truth, and desired nothing so much
as to tell it. But it must be the truth as perceived by him, not as
it might appear to others.* His readers are expected, if not to see
with his eyes, at least to look from his point of view. Honestly
believing that the Reformation was a great and beneficent fact in
the progress of mankind, he was incapable of treating it as a sinful
rebellion against the authority of the Church. Holding Henry VIII.,
with all his faults, to have been the champion of the laity against
the clergy, of spiritual and intellectual freedom against the Roman
yoke, he could not represent him as a monster of wickedness,
trampling on morality for his own selfish ends. Doing full justice
to the conscientiousness of Mary Tudor, excusing her more than some
think she ought to be excused, he depicted the heroes of her bloody
reign not only in Latimer and Ridley, but in the scores and hundreds
of lowlier persons who died for the faith of Christ.

--
* "Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth or error, but
that anything is true to a man which he troweth? and not rather, as
the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable
it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our
moral as well as our intellectual being?"--Newman's Grammar of
Assent, p. 311.
--

Protestant as he was, however, Froude was an Englishman first and a
Protestant afterwards. One might say of his history, as was said of
the drama which Tennyson founded upon the fifth and sixth volumes,
that the true heroine is the English people. Much of his popularity
was due to his patriotism and his Protestantism. On the other hand
he gave deep and lasting offence to High Churchmen, which they
neither forgot nor forgave. They could not bear the spectacle of a
Church established by statute, of the king in place of the Pope, of
Cromwell and Cranmer justified, of More and Fisher condemned. While
not unwilling to profit by Erastianism, they liked its origin kept
out of sight. Bishops appointed by the Crown and sitting in the
House of Lords, though awkward facts, were too familiar to be
upsetting. The secular and Parliamentary origin of praemunire and
conge d' elire were less notorious and more disagreeable subjects.
They were indeed to be found in Hallam. But Hallam had not the
popularity or the influence of Froude. Constitutional histories are
for the learned classes. Froude wrote for men of the world. The
consummate dexterity of his style was only observed by trained
critics; its ease and grace were the unconscious delight of the
humblest reader. Froude gave to the Protestant cause the same sort
of distinction which Newman had given to the Oxford Movement.
Newman's University sermons are neither learned nor profound. Yet
the preacher's mastery of the English language in all its rich and
manifold resources has, and must always have, an irresistible charm.
The mantle of Newman had fallen on Froude, and Froude had also the
indefatigable diligence of the born historian. None of his mistakes
were due to carelessness. They proceeded rather from the multitude
of the documents he studied and the self-reliance which led him to
dispense with all external aid. He had of course friendly reviewers,
such as William Bodham Donne; afterwards Examiner of Plays, in
Fraser, and Charles Kingsley in Macmillan. Kingsley, however, though
Lord Palmerston made him Professor of Modern History at Cambridge,
was not altogether the best ally for an historian. It was in
defending Froude that Kingsley made his unfortunate attack upon
Newman, which led to his own discomfiture in the first Preface to
the Apologia. Froude was unable to support his champion's irrelevant
and unlucky onslaught. Newman's casuistry was a fair subject for
criticism; his personal integrity should have been above suspicion,
and Kingsley's insinuations against it only recoiled upon himself.
No one, as his History shows, could do ampler justice to individual
Catholics than Froude, and his feelings for Newman were never
altered, either by disagreement or by time.

The first part of the History had just been finished when a sudden
bereavement altered the whole course of Froude's life. On the 21st
of April, 1860, Mrs. Froude died. Her religious opinions had been
very different from her husband's. She had always leant towards the
Church of Rome, though after her marriage she did not conform to it.
He was probably under Mrs. Froude's influence when he wrote his
Essay on the Philosophy of Catholicism in 1851, reprinted in the
first series of Short Studies, which does not strike one as at all
characteristic of him, and is certainly quite different from his
noble discourse on the Book of Job, published two years later. Mrs.
Froude never cared for London, and had always lived in the country.
After her death Froude took for the first time a London house, and
settled himself with his children in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park.

Later in the same year died his publisher, John Parker the younger,
of a painful and distressing illness, through which Froude nursed
him with tender affection. The elder Parker kept on the business,
and brought out the remaining volumes of Froude's History. His son
had been editor of Fraser's Magazine, and in that position Froude
succeeded him at the beginning of 1861. He thus found a regular
occupation besides his History. Fraser had a high literary
reputation, and among its regular contributors was John Skelton,
writing under the name of "Shirley," who became one of Froude's most
intimate friends. In the Table Talk of Shirley* are some interesting
extracts from Froude's letters, as well as a very vivid description
of Froude himself. On the 12th of January, when he was only just
installed, Froude began a correspondence kept up for thirty years by
a brief note about Thelatta, a political romance by Skelton, with
an odd, mixed portrait of Canning and Disraeli, very pleasant to
read, but now almost, I do not know why, neglected.

--
* Blackwood, 1895.
--

Froude is hardly just to it. "I have read Thalatta," he writes, "and
now what shall I say? for it is so charming, and it might be so much
more charming. There is no mistake about its value. The yacht scene
made me groan over the recollections of days and occupations exactly
the same. To wander round the world in a hundred tons schooner would
be my highest realisation of human felicity." Even the name of the
book must have appealed to Froude. For more than almost any other
man of letters he loved the sea. Yachting was his passion. He
pursued it in youth despite of qualms, and in later life they
disappeared. Constitutionally fearless, and an excellent sailor, a
voyage was to him the best of holidays, invigorating the body and
refreshing the brain.

Froude was already at work on the reign of Elizabeth, and in March,
1861, he went to Spain for two months. This was the occasion of his
earliest visit to Simancas, where he was allowed free access to the
diplomatic correspondence and other records there collected and
kept. The advantage to Froude of these documents, especially the
despatches from the Spanish Ambassadors in London to the Government
at Madrid, was enormous, and it is from them that the last volumes
of the History derive their peculiar value. He used his
opportunities to the utmost, and his bulky, voluminous transcripts
may be seen at the British Museum. His plan was to take rooms at
Valladolid, from which he drove to Simancas, a wretched little
village, and worked for the day. The unpublished materials which he
found at his disposal were such as scarcely any historian had ever
enjoyed before.

A few months after his return to England, on the 12th of September,
1861, he married his second wife, Henrietta Warre. Miss Warre, who
had been his first wife's intimate friend, was exactly suited to
him, and their union was one of perfect happiness. So long as he was
editor of Fraser, Froude felt it his duty to write pretty regularly
for it, so that his hands were constantly full. But of course his
main business for the next ten years was the continuation of his
History, which involved frequent visits to Simancas, as well as many
to the British Museum, the Record Office, and Hatfield House.

From the Marquess of Salisbury, father of the late Prime Minister,
Froude received permission to search the Cecil papers at Hatfield,
which, though less numerous than those in the Record Office, are
invaluable to students of Elizabeth's reign. His investigations at
Hatfield were begun in April, 1862, and led, among other
consequences, to one of his most valued friendships. With Lady
Salisbury, afterwards Lady Derby, he kept up for more than thirty
years a correspondence which only ended with his death. It was
Froude who introduced Lady Salisbury to Carlyle, and she thoroughly
appreciated the genius of both. Her intimate knowledge of politics
was completed when Lord Derby sat in Disraeli's Cabinet. But she was
always behind the scenes, and it was from her that Froude obtained
most of his political information. Their earliest communications,
however, referred to the Elizabethan part of the History, especially
to the career and influence of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. A
preliminary letter shows the thoroughness of Froude's methods. The
date is the 5th of March, 1862.

"DEAR LADY SALISBURY,--If Lord Salisbury has not repented of his
kind promise to me, I shall in a few weeks be in a condition to
avail myself of it, and I write to ask you whether about the
beginning of next month I may be permitted to examine the papers at
Hatfield. I am unwilling to trouble Lord Salisbury more than
necessary. I have therefore examined every other collection within
my reach first, that I might know clearly what I wanted. Obliged as
I am to confine myself for the present to the first ten years of
Elizabeth's reign, there will not be much which I shall have to
examine there, the great bulk of Lord Burleigh's papers for that
time being in the Record Office--but if I can be allowed a few days'
work, I believe I can turn them to good account. With my very best
thanks for your own and Salisbury's goodness in this matter, I
remain, faithfully yours,

"J. A. FROUDE."

A few days later he writes: "I have seen Stewart and looked through
the catalogue. There appear to be about eight volumes which I wish
to examine. The volumes which I marked as containing matter at
present important to me are Vols. 2 and 3 on the war with France and
Scotland from 1559 to 1563, Vols. 138, 152, 153, 154, 155 on the
disputes relating to the succession to the English Crown, and the
respective claims of the Queen of Scots, Lady Catherine Grey, Lord
Darnley, and Laqy Margaret Lennox. I noted the volumes only. I did
not take notice of the pages because as far as I could see the
volumes appeared to be given up to special subjects, and I should
wish therefore to read them through."

His growing admiration for Cecil appears in the following extracts:

"I could only do real justice to such a collection by being allowed
to read through the whole of it volume by volume--and for such a
large permission as that I fear it may be dangerous to ask. Lord
Salisbury, however, whatever my faults may be, could find no one who
has a more genuine admiration for his ancestor."

October 16th, 1864.--"I cannot say beforehand the papers which I wish
to examine, as I cannot tell what the collection may contain. My
object is to have everything which admits of being learnt about the
period--especially what may throw light on Lord Burleigh's
character. He, it is more and more clear to me, was the solitary
author of Elizabeth's and England's greatness."

"I shall return from Simancas," he writes from Valladolid, "more a
Cecil maniac than ever. In the Duke of Norfolk's conspiracy, the
Queen seems to have fairly given up the reins to him. It is
impossible to read the correspondence between Philip, Alva, the
Pope, the Duke of Norfolk, and the Queen of Scots, the deliberate
arrangements for Elizabeth's murder, without shivering to think how
near a chance it was. Cecil was the one only man they feared, and
the skill with which he dug mines below theirs, and pulled the
strings of the whole of Europe against them, was truly splendid.
Elizabeth had lost her head with it all, but she knew it and did not
interfere. There are a great many letters of the Queen of Scots at
Simancas, some of them of the deepest interest. She remains the same
as I have always thought her--brilliant, cruel, ruthless, and
perfectly unfeeling."

Although Froude's admiration for Elizabeth steadily diminished with
the progress of his researches, even students of his History will be
surprised by such a verdict as this:

"I am slowly drawing to the end of my long journey through the
Records. By far the largest part of Burghley's papers is here [in
the Record Office], and not at Hatfield. The private letters which
passed between him and Walsingham about Elizabeth have destroyed
finally the prejudice that still clung to me that, notwithstanding
her many faults, she was a woman of ability. Evidently in their
opinion she had no ability at all worth calling by the name."

Two or three extracts will complete the part of this correspondence
which deals with the composition of the History. "I have been
incessantly busy in the Record Office since my return to London. The
more completely I examine the MSS. elsewhere the better use I shall
be able to make of yours. I have still two months of this kind
before me, and my intention, if you did not yourself write to me
first, was to ask you to let me go to Hatfield for a week or two
about Easter."

"I am now sufficiently master of the story to be able to make very
good (I daresay complete) use of the Hatfield papers in my present
condition. I feel as if there were very few dark places left in
Queen Elizabeth's proceedings anywhere. I substantially end, in a
blaze of fireworks, with the Armada. The concentrated interest of
the reign lies in the period now under my hands. It is all action,
and I shall use my materials badly if I cannot make it as
interesting as a novel."

Nothing was neglected by Froude which could throw light upon the
splendid and illustrious Queen who raised England from the depths of
degradation to the height of renown. It was at the zenith of
Elizabeth's career that Froude stopped. His original intention had
been to continue till her death. But the ample scale on which he had
planned his book was so much enlarged by his copious quotations from
the manuscripts at Simancas that by the time he reached his eleventh
volume he substituted for the death of Elizabeth on his title-page
the defeat of the Armada. With the year 1588, then, he closed his
labours. Even the perverse critics who had assumed to treat the
History of Henry VIII. as an anti-ecclesiastical pamphlet were
compelled to show more respect for volumes which gave so much novel
information to the world. Moreover Henry's daughter was a very
different person from her father. Scandal about Queen Elizabeth had
been chiefly confined to Roman Catholics, and few Englishmen had
forgotten who made England the mistress of the seas. The old
religion had a strong fascination for her, and every one knows how
she interrupted Dean Nowell when he preached against images. She
declined to be the head of the Church in the sense arrogated by
Henry, and yet she would by no means admit the supremacy of the
Pope. If she ever felt any inclination towards Rome, the massacre of
St. Bartholomew checked it for ever. Gregory XIII. and Catherine de Medici
were rulers to her taste. On the other hand she resisted the persecuting
tendencies of her Bishops, and spared the life even of such a wretch as
Bonner. It is possible that she believed in transubstantiation. It
is certain that she objected to the marriage of the clergy, and
showed scant courtesy to the wife of her own favourite Archbishop
Parker. Nor would she suffer the Bishops, except as Peers, to meddle
in affairs of State. A magnificent princess, every inch a queen, she
could not forget that the English people had saved her life from the
clutches of her sister, and it was for them, not for any Minister,
courtier, or lover, that she really cared.

Froude was no idolater of Elizabeth, and he became more unfavourable
to her as he proceeded. He dwells minutely upon all her intrigues,
in which she was as petty as in great matters she was grand. For her
rival, Mary Stuart, he had neither respect nor mercy. To her
intellect indeed, which was quite on a par with Elizabeth's, he does
full justice. But neither her beauty nor her wit, neither her
scholarship nor her statesmanship, neither her passion nor her
courage, could blind him to her selfishness, her immorality, and the
fact that she represented the Catholic cause. His account of her
execution certainly lacks sentiment, and Mrs. Norton accused him of
writing like a disappointed lover. His sympathies are with John
Knox, and the Regent Murray, and Maitland of Lethington. But the man
who believes that Mary was not concerned in the murder of her
husband will believe anything, even that she did not reward the
murderer of her brother, or that she would have spared Elizabeth if
Elizabeth had been in her power. And at least Froude does not, like
some more modern writers, degrade her to the level of a kitchen
wench. Froude's Elizabeth was the subject of bitter, hostile,
sometimes violent, criticism in The Saturday Review, the property of
an ardent High Churchman, Beresford Hope. In the next chapter I
shall deal with these articles at more length. It is enough to say
here that they were directed not merely at Froude's accuracy as an
historian, but at his truthfulness as a man, suggesting that the
mode in which he had manipulated authorities accessible to every one
threw grave doubts upon his version of what he read at Simancas.
Froude knew very well that he should make enemies. His belief that
history had been cericalised, and required to be laicised, was
regarded as peculiarly offensive in one who had been himself
ordained.

Mary Stuart, moreover, had stalwart champions beyond the border who
were neither clerical nor ecclesiastical. "I fear," Froude wrote on
the 22nd of May, 1862, to his Scottish friend Skelton, who was
himself much interested in the subject--"I fear my book will bring
all your people about my ears. Mary Stuart, from my point of view,
was something between Rachel and a pantheress."

The success of the History had been long since assured, and each
successive pair of volumes met with a cordial welcome. Many people
disagreed with Froude on many points. He expected disagreement, and
did not mind it. But no one could fail to see the evidence of patient,
thorough research which every chapter, almost every page,
contains. Indeed, it might be said with justice, or at least with
some plausibility, that the long and frequent extracts from the
despatches of De Feria, de Quadra, de Silva, and Don Guereau,
successively Ambassadors from Philip to Elizabeth, water-log the
book, and make it too like a series of extracts with explanatory
comments. Of Froude's own style there could not be two opinions. His
bitterest antagonists were forced to admit that it was the
perfection of easy, graceful narrative, without the majestic
splendour of Gibbon, but also without the mechanical hardness of
Macaulay. Froude did not stop deliberately, as other historians have
stopped, to paint pictures or draw portraits, and there are few
writers from whom it is more difficult to make typical or
characteristic extracts. Yet, as I have already quoted from his
account of Cranmer's execution, it may not be inappropriate that I
should cite some of the thoughts suggested to him by the death of
Knox. Morton's epitaph is well known.

"There lies one," said the Earl over the coffin, "who never feared
the face of mortal man." "Morton," says Froude, "spoke only of what
he knew; the full measure of Knox's greatness neither he nor any man
could then estimate. It is as we look back over that stormy time,
and weigh the actors in it one against the other, that he stands out
in his full proportions. No grander figure can be found, in the
entire history of the Reformation in this island, than that of Knox.
Cromwell and Burghley rank beside him for the work which they
effected, but, as politicians and statesmen, they had to labour with
instruments which soiled their hands in touching them. In purity, in
uprightness, in courage, truth and stainless honour, the Regent and
Latimer were perhaps his equals; but Murray was intellectually far
below him and the sphere of Latimer's influence was on a smaller
scale. The time has come when English history may do justice to one
but for whom the Reformation would have been overthrown among
ourselves; for the spirit which Knox created saved Scotland; and if
Scotland had been Catholic again, neither the wisdom of Elizabeth's
Ministers, nor the teaching of her Bishops, nor her own chicaneries,
would have preserved England from revolution. His was the voice that
taught the peasant of the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal
in the sight of God with the proudest peer or prelate that had
trampled on his forefathers. He was the one antagonist whom Mary
Stuart could not soften nor Maitland deceive. He it was who had
raised the poor commons of his country into a stern and rugged
people, who might be hard, narrow, superstitious and fanatical, but
who nevertheless were men whom neither king, noble, nor priest could
force again to submit to tyranny. And his reward has been the
ingratitude of those who should have done most honour to his
memory."

The spirit of this fine passage may be due to the great Scotsman
with whom Froude's name will always be inseparably associated. But
Froude knew the subject as Carlyle did not pretend to know it, and
his verdict is as authoritative as it is just. It is knowledge, even
more than brilliancy, that these twelve volumes evince. Froude had
mastered the sixteenth century as Macaulay mastered the seventeenth,
with the same minute, patient industry. When he came to write he
wrote with such apparent facility that those who did not know the
meaning of historical research thought him shallow and superficial.

The period during which Froude was studying the reign of Elizabeth
must be pronounced the happiest of his life. He was a born
historian, and loved research. He had opportunities of acquiring
knowledge opened to no one before, and it concerned those events
which above all others attracted him. His second wife was the most
sympathetic of companions, thoroughly understanding all his moods.
She was fond of society, and induced him to frequent it. Froude was
disinclined to go out in the evening, and would, if he had been left
to himself, have stayed at home. He wrote to Lady Salisbury: "I must
trust to your kindness to make allowance for my old-fashioned ways.
I am so much engaged in the week that I give my Sunday evenings to
my children, and never go out." But when he was in company he talked
better than almost any one else, and he had a magnetic power of
fascination which men as well as women often found quite
irresistible. Living in London, he saw people of all sorts, and the
puritan sternness which lay at the root of his character was
concealed by the cynical humour which gave zest to his conversation.
He had not forgotten his native county, and in 1863 he took a house
at Salcombe on the southern coast of Devonshire. Ringrone, which he
rented from Lord Kingsale, is a beautiful spot, now a hotel, then
remote from railways, and an ideal refuge for a student. "We have a
sea like the Mediterranean," he tells Skelton, "and estuaries
beautiful as Loch Fyne, the green water washing our garden wall, and
boats and mackerel." Froude worked there, however, besides yachting,
fishing, and shooting.

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