The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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In 1864, for instance, he "floundered all the summer among the
extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics--the most damnable set of
pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark."
His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of
the finest in England. Froude loved Devonshire folk, and enjoyed
talking to them in their own dialect, or smoking with them on the
shore. He was particularly fond of the indignant expostulation of a
poor woman whose husband had been injured by his own chopper, and
obliged in consequence to keep his bed. If, she said, it had been "a
visitation of Providence, or the like of that there," he would have
borne it patiently. "But to come upon a man in the wood-house" was
not in the fitness of things. Froude's favourite places of worship
in London were Westminster Abbey during Dean Stanley's time, and
afterwards the Temple Church, as may be gathered from his Short
Study on the Templars. In Devonshire he frequented an old-fashioned
church where stringed instruments were still played, and was much
delighted with the remark of a fiddler which he overheard. "Who is
the King of glory?" had been given out as the anthem. While the
fiddles were tuning up a voice was heard to say: "Hand us up the
rosin, Tom; us'it soon tell them who's the King of glory."

As an editor Froude was tolerant and catholic. "On controverted
points," he said, "I approve myself of the practice of the
Reformation. When St. Paul's Cross pulpit was occupied one Sunday by
a Lutheran, the next by a Catholic, the next by a Calvinist, all
sides had a hearing, and the preachers knew that they would be
pulled up before the same audience for what they might say." His own
literary judgments were rather conventional. The mixture of classes
in Clough's Bothie disturbed him. The genius of Matthew Arnold he
had recognised at once, but then Arnold was a classical, academic
poet. About Tennyson he agreed with the rest of the world, while
Tennyson, who was a personal friend, paid him the great compliment
of taking from him the subject of a poem and the material of a play.
His prejudice against Browning's style, much as he liked Browning
himself, was hard to overcome, and on this point he had a serious
difference with his friend Skelton. "Browning's verse!" he exclaims.
"With intellect, thought, power, grace, all the charms in detail
which poetry should have, it rings after all like a bell of lead."
This was in 1863, when Browning had published Men and Women, and
Dramatic Lyrics. However, he admitted Skelton's article on the other
side, and added, with magnificent candour, that "to this generation
Browning's poetry is as uninteresting as Shakespeare's Sonnets were
to the last century." The most fervent Browningite could have said
no more than that. To Mr. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads Froude was
conspicuously fair. There was much in them which offended his
Puritanism, but he was disgusted with the virulence of the critics,
and he allowed Skelton to write in Fraser a qualified apology.

"The Saturday Review temperament," he wrote, "is ten thousand
thousand times more damnable than the worst of Swinburne's skits.
Modern respectability is so utterly without God, faith, heart; it
shows so singular an ingenuity in and injuring everything that is
noble and good, and so systematic a preference for what is mean and
paltry, that I am not surprised at a young fellow dashing his heels
into the face of it .... When there is any kind of true genius, we
have no right to drive it mad. We must deal with it wisely, justly,
fairly."*

--
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 137.
--

Froude was an excellent editor; appreciative, discriminating, and
alert. He prided himself on Carlyle's approval, though perhaps
Carlyle was not the best judge of such things. His energy was
multifarious. Besides his History and his magazine, he found time
for a stray lecture at odd times, and he could always reckon upon a
good audience. His discourse at the Royal Institution in February,
1864, on "The Science of History," for which he was "called an
atheist," is in the main a criticism of Buckle, the one really
scientific historian. According to Buckle, the history of mankind
was a natural growth, and it was only inadequate knowledge of the
past that made the impossibility of predicting the future. Great men
were like small men, obeying the same natural laws, though a trifle
more erratic in their behaviour. Political economy was history in
little, illustrating the regularity of human, like all other
natural, forces. But can we predict historical events, as we can
predict an eclipse? That is Froude's answer to Buckle, in the form
of a question.

"Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he
lived out the full life of man, he would have seen Europe at the
feet of Napoleon. But a few years ago we believed the world had
grown too civilised for war, and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was
to be the inauguration of a new era. Battles, bloody as Napoleon's,
are now the familiar tale of every day; and the arts which have made
the greatest progress are the arts of destruction." It is difficult
to see the atheism in all this, but the common sense is plain
enough. Froude belonged to the school of literary historians, such
as were Thucydides and Tacitus, Gibbon and Finlay, not to the school
of Buckle, or, as we should now say, of Professor Bury.

In 1865 Froude removed from Clifton Place, Hyde Park, to Onslow
Gardens in South Kensington, where he lived for the next quarter of
a century. In 1868 the students of St. Andrews chose him to be Lord
Rector of the University, and on the 23rd of March, 1869, he
delivered his Inaugural Address on Education, which compared the
plain living and high thinking of the Scottish Universities with the
expensive and luxurious idleness that he remembered at Oxford.
Froude was delighted with the compliment the students had paid him,
and they were equally charmed with their Rector. In fact, his visit
to St. Andrews produced in 1869 a suggestion that he should become
the Parliamentary representative of that University and of
Edinburgh. But the injustice of the law as it then stood
disqualified him as a candidate. His deacon's orders, the shadowy
remnant of a mistaken choice, stood in his way. Next year, in 1870,
Bouverie's Act passed, and Froude was one of the first to take
advantage of it by becoming again, what he had really never ceased
to be, a layman. As he did not enter the House of Commons, it is
idle to speculate on what might have been his political career.
Probably it would have been undistinguished. He was not a good
speaker, and he was a bad party man. His butler, who had been long
with him, and knew him well, was once asked by a canvassing agent
what his master's politics were. "Well," he said reflectively, "when
the Liberals are in, Mr. Froude is sometimes a Conservative. When
the Conservatives are in, Mr. Froude is always a Liberal." His own
master, Carlyle, had been in early life an ardent reformer, and had
hoped great things from the Act of 1832. Perhaps he did not know
very clearly what he expected. At any rate he was disappointed, and,
though he wrote an enthusiastic letter to Peel alter the abolition
of the Corn Laws, he regarded the Reform Act of 1867 with indignant
disgust.

Froude had a fitful and uncertain admiration for Disraeli. Gladstone
he never liked or trusted, and did not take the trouble to
understand. He had been brought up to despise oratory, he had caught
from Carlyle a horror of democracy, he disliked the Anglo-Catholic
party in the Church of England, and Gladstone's financial genius was
out of his line. The Liberal Government of 1868 was in his opinion
criminally indifferent to the Colonies. An earnest advocate of
Federation, he did not see that the best way of retaining colonial
loyalty was to preserve colonial independence intact. Nevertheless
Froude was a pioneer of the modern movement, still in progress, for
a closer union with the scattered parts of the British Empire. He
feared that the Colonies would go if some effort were not made to
retain them, and he turned over in his mind the various means of
building up a federal system. Although Canadian Federation was
emphatically Canadian in its origin, and had been adopted in
principle by Cardwell during the Government of Lord Russell, it was
Lord Carnarvon who carried it out, and he had no warmer supporter
than Froude.

Of Froude's favourite recreations at this time the best account is
to be found in his two Short Studies on A Fortnight in Kerry. From
1868 to 1870 he rented from Lord Lansdowne a place called Derreen,
thirty-six miles from Killarney, and seventeen from Kenmare, where
he spent the best part of the summer and autumn. If Froude did not
altogether understand the Irish people, at least the Irish
Catholics, and had no sympathy with their political aspirations, he
loved their humour, and the scenery of "the most beautiful island in
the world" had been familiar to him from his early manhood. In one
of his youthful rambles he had been struck down by small-pox, and
nursed with a devotion which he never forgot. Yet between him and
the Celt, as between him and the Catholic, there was a mysterious,
impassable barrier. They had not the same fundamental ideas of right
and wrong. They did not in very truth worship the same God. But of
Froude and the Irish I shall have to speak more at length hereafter.
In Kerry he enjoyed himself, while at the same time he finished his
History of England, and his description of the country is
enchanting.

"A glance out of the window in the morning showed that I had not
overrated the general charm of the situation. The colours were
unlike those of any mountain scenery to which I was accustomed
elsewhere. The temperature is many degrees higher than that of the
Scotch highlands. The Gulf Stream impinges full upon the mouths of
its long bays. Every tide carries the flood of warm water forty
miles inland, and the vegetation consequently is rarely or never
checked by frost even two thousand feet above the sea-level. Thus
the mountains have a greenness altogether peculiar, stretches of
grass as rich as water-meadows reaching between the crags and
precipices to the very summits. The rock, chiefly old red sandstone,
is purple. The heather, of which there are enormous masses, is in
many places waist deep." Yachting and fishing, fishing and yachting,
were the staple amusements at Derreen. Nothing was more
characteristic of Froude than his love of the sea and the open air.
Sport, in the proper sense of the term, he also loved. "I always
consider," he said, "that the proudest moment of my life was, when
sliding down a shale heap, I got a right and left at woodcocks." For
luxurious modes of making big bags with little trouble he never
cared at all. But let him once more explain himself in his own
words. "I delight in a mountain walk when I must work hard for my
five brace of grouse. I see no amusement in dawdling over a lowland
moor where the packs are as thick as chickens in a poultry-yard. I
like better than most things a day with my own dogs in scattered
covers, when I know not what may rise--a woodcock, an odd pheasant,
a snipe in the out-lying willow-bed, and perhaps a mallard or a
teal. A hare or two falls in agreeably when the mistress of the
house takes an interest in the bag. I detest battues and hot
corners, and slaughter for slaughter's sake. I wish every tenant in
England had his share in amusements which in moderation are good for
us all, and was allowed to shoot such birds or beasts as were bred
on his own farm, any clause in his lease to the contrary
notwithstanding." Considering that this passage was written ten
years before the Ground Game Act, it must be admitted that the
sentiment is remarkably liberal. The chief interest of these
papers,* however, is not political, but personal. They show what
Froude's natural tastes were, the tastes of a sportsman and a
country gentleman. He had long outgrown the weakness of his boyhood,
and his physical health was robust. With a firm foot and a strong
head he walked freely over cliffs where a false step would have
meant a fall of a thousand feet. No man of letters was ever more
devoted to exercise and sport. Though subject, like most men, and
all editors, to fits of despondency, he had a sound mind in a
healthy frame, and his pessimism was purely theoretical.

--
* Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 217-308.
--

Froude's History, the great work of his life, was completed in 1870.
He deliberately chose, after the twelve volumes, to leave Elizabeth
at the height of her power, mistress of the seas, with Spain crushed
at her feet. As he says himself, in the opening paragraph of his own
Conclusion, "Chess-players, when they have brought their game to a
point at which the result can be foreseen with certainty, regard
their contest as ended, and sweep the pieces from the board." Froude
had accomplished his purpose. He had rewritten the story of the
Reformation. He had proved that the Church of England, though in a
sense it dated from St. Austin of Canterbury, became under Henry
VIII. a self-contained institution, independent of Rome and subject
to the supremacy of the Crown.

Elizabeth altered the form of words in which her father had
expressed his ecclesiastical authority; but the substance was in
both cases the same. The sovereign was everything. The Bishop of
Rome was nothing. There has never been in the Church of England
since the divorce of Katharine any power to make a Bishop without
the authority of the Crown, or to change a doctrine without the
authority of Parliament, nor has any layman been legally subject to
temporal punishment by the ecclesiastical courts. Convocation cannot
touch an article or a formulary. King, Lords, and Commons can make
new formularies or abolish the old. The laity owe no allegiance to
the Canons, and in every theological suit the final appeal is to the
King in Council, now the Judicial Committee. Since the accession of
Elizabeth divine service has been performed in English, and the
English Bible has been open to every one who can read. Yet there are
people who talk as if the Reformation meant nothing, was nothing,
never occurred at all. This theory, like the shallow sentimentalism
which made an innocent saint and martyr of Mary Stuart, has never
recovered from the crushing onslaught of Froude.

Mr. Swinburne in the Encyclopaedia Britannica reduces the latter
theory to an absurdity, by demonstrating that if Mary was innocent
she was a fool. In his defence of Elizabeth Froude stops short of
many admirers. He was disgusted by her feminine weakness for
masculine flattery; he dwells with almost tedious minuteness upon
her smallest intrigues; he exposes her parsimonious ingratitude to
her dauntless and unrivalled seamen. Yet for all that he brings out
the vital difference between her and Mary Tudor, between the
Protestant and Catholic systems of government. Elizabeth boasted,
and boasted truly, that she did not persecute opinion. If people
were good citizens and loyal subjects, it was all the same to her
whether they went to church or to mass. Had it been possible to
adopt and apply in the sixteenth century the modern doctrine of
contemptuous indifference to sectarian quarrels, there was not one
of her subjects more capable of appreciating and acting upon it than
the great Queen herself. But in that case she would have estranged
her friends without conciliating her opponents. She would have
forfeited her throne and her life. Pius V. had not merely
excommunicated her, which was a barren and ineffective threat, a
telum imbelle sine ictu; he had also purported to depose her as a
heretic, and to release her subjects from the duty of allegiance.
Another Vicar of Christ, Gregory XIII., went farther. He intimated,
not obscurely, that whosoever removed such a monster from the world
would be doing God's service. This at least was no idle menace.
Those great leaders of Protestantism in Europe, Coligny, Murray,
William the Silent, were successively murdered within a few years.
That was, as Fra Paolo said when he saw the dagger (stilus) which
had wounded him, the style (stylus) of the Roman Court. It is all
very well to say that Gregory was a blasphemous, murderous old
bigot, and might have been left to the God of justice and mercy, who
would deal with him in His own good time. Before that time came,
Elizabeth might have been in her grave, Mary Stuart might have been
on the English throne, and the liberties of England might have been
as the liberties of Spain.

Elizabeth never felt personal fear. But she was not a private
individual. She was an English sovereign, and the keynote of all her
subtle, intricate, tortuous policy was the resolute determination,
from which she never flinched, that England should be independent,
spiritually as well as politically independent, of a foreign yoke.
Her connection with the Protestants was political, not theological,
for doctrinally she was farther from Geneva than from Rome. Her own
Bishops she despised, not unjustly, as time-servers, calling them
"doctors," not prelates. Although she did not really believe that
any human person, or any human formula, was required between the
Almighty and His creatures, she preferred the mass and the breviary
to the Book of Common Prayer. The Inquisition was the one part of
the Catholic system which she really abhorred. For the first twenty
years of her reign mass was celebrated in private houses with
impunity, though to celebrate it was against the law. No part of her
policy is more odious to modern notions of tolerance and
enlightenment than prohibition of the mass. Nothing shows more
clearly the importance of understanding the mental atmosphere of a
past age before we attempt to judge those who lived in it. Even
Oliver Cromwell, fifty years after Elizabeth's death, declared that
he would not tolerate the mass, and in general principles of
religious freedom he was far ahead of his age. Cromwell no doubt,
unlike Elizabeth, was a Protestant in the religious sense. But that
was not his reason. The mass to him, and still more to Elizabeth,
was a definite symbol of political disaffection. It was a rallying
point for those who held that a heretical sovereign had no right to
reign, and might lawfully be deposed, if not worse. Between the
Catholics of our day and the Catholics of Elizabeth's time there is
a great gulf fixed. What has fixed it is a question too complex to
be discussed in this place. Catholics still revere the memory of
Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, who gave his blessing
to Campian and Parsons on their way to stir up rebellion in England,
as well as in Ireland, and to assassinate Elizabeth if opportunity
should serve. God said, "Thou shall do no murder." The Pope,
however, thought that God had spoken too broadly, and that some
qualification was required. The sixth commandment could not have
been intended for the protection of heretics; and the Jesuits, if
they did not inspire, at least believed him. Campian is regarded by
thousands of good men and women, who would not hurt a fly, as a
martyr to the faith, and to the faith as he conceived it he was a
martyr. He endured torture and death without flinching rather than
acknowledge that Elizabeth was lawful sovereign over the whole
English realm. His courage was splendid. There never, for the matter
of that, was a braver man than Guy Fawkes. But when Campian
pretended that his mission to England was purely religious he was
tampering with words in order to deceive. To him the removal of
Elizabeth would have been a religious act. The Queen did all she
could to make him save his life by recantation, even applying the
cruel and lawless machinery of the rack. If his errand had been
merely to preach what he regarded as Catholic truth, she would have
let him go, as she checked the persecuting tendencies of her Bishops
over and over again. But it was as much her duty to defend England
from the invasion of the Jesuits as to defend her from the invasion
of the Spanish Armada. Both indeed were parts of one and the same
enterprise, the forcible reduction of England to dependence upon the
Catholic powers. Although in God's good providence it was foiled, it
very nearly succeeded; and if Elizabeth had not removed Campian,
Campian might, as Babington certainly would, have remove her.

The Pope had been directly concerned in the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, and his great ally, Philip II., is said to have laughed
for the first time when he heard of it. More than a hundred years
afterwards the pious Bossuet thanked God for the frightful slaughter
of the Huguenots which followed the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes. While Mary Tudor burnt poor and humble persons who could be
no possible danger to the State because they would not renounce the
only form of Christian faith they had ever known, Elizabeth executed
for treason powerful and influential men sent by the Pope to kill
her. When, after many long years, she reluctantly consented to Mary
Stuart's death on the scaffold, Mary had been implicated in a plot
to take her life and succeed her as queen. Mary would have made much
shorter work of her. If that is called persecution, the word ceases
to have any meaning.

Froude quotes with approval, as well he might, the words of
Campian's admiring biographer Richard Simpson, himself a Catholic, a
most learned and accomplished man. "The eternal truths of
Catholicism were made the vehicle for opinions about the authority
of the Holy See which could not be held by Englishmen loyal to the
Government; and true patriotism united to a false religion overcame
the true religion wedded to opinions that were unpatriotic in
regard to the liberties of Englishmen, and treasonable to the
English Government." In those days there was only one kind of
English Government possible; the Government of Elizabeth, Burghley,
and Walsingham. Parliamentary Government did not exist. Even the
right of free speech in the House of Commons was never recognised by
the Queen. If the English Government had fallen, England would have
been at the mercy of a Papal legate. Protestantism was synonymous
with patriotism, and good Catholics could not be good Englishmen
while there was a heretical sovereign on the throne. After the
Armada things were different. Spain was crushed. Sixtus V. was not a
man to waste money, which he loved, in support of a losing cause.
What Froude wrote to establish, and succeeded in establishing, was
that between 1529 and 1588 the Reformation saved England from the
tyranny of Rome and the proud foot of a Spanish conqueror.

The true hero of Froude's History is not Henry VIII., but Cecil, the
firm, incorruptible, sagacious Minister who saved Elizabeth's
throne, and made England the leading anti-Catholic country. Of a
greater man than Cecil, John Knox, he was however almost an
idolater. He considered that Knox surpassed in worldly wisdom even
Maitland of Lethington, who was certainly not hampered by
theological prejudice. With Puritanism itself he had much natural
affinity, and as a determinist the philosophical side of Calvinism
attracted him as strongly as it attracted Jonathan Edwards. Froude
combined, perhaps illogically, a belief in predestination with a
deep sense of moral duty and the responsibility of man. Every reader
of his History must have been struck by his respect for all the
manly virtues, even in those with whom he has otherwise no sympathy,
and his corresponding contempt for weakness and self-indulgence. In
his second and final Address to the students of St. Andrews he took
Calvinism as his theme.* By this time Froude had acquired a great
name, and was known all over the world as the most brilliant of
living English historians. Although his uncompromising treatment of
Mary Stuart had provoked remonstrance, his eulogy of Knox and Murray
was congenial to the Scottish temperament, with which he had much in
common. It was indeed from St. Andrews alone that he had hitherto
received any public recognition. He was grateful to the students,
and gave them of his best, so that this lecture may be taken as an
epitome of his moral and religious belief.

--
* Short Studies, vol. ii. pp. 1-60.
--

"Calvinism," he told these lads, "was the spirit which rises in
revolt against untruth; the spirit which, as I have shown you, has
appeared and reappeared, and in due time will appear again, unless
God be a delusion and man be as the beasts that perish. For it is but
the inflashing upon the conscience with overwhelming force of the
nature and origin of the laws by which mankind are governed--laws
which exist, whether we acknowledge them or whether we deny them, and
will have their way, to our weal or woe, according to the attitude in
which we please to place ourselves towards them--inherent, like
electricity, in the nature of things, not made by us, not to be
altered by us, but to be discerned and obeyed by us at our
everlasting peril." The essence of Froude's belief, not otherwise
dogmatic, was a constant sense of God's presence and overruling
power. Sceptical his mind in many ways was. The two things he never
doubted, and would not doubt, were theism and the moral law. Without
God there would be no religion. Without morality there would be no
difference between right and wrong. This simple creed was sufficient
for him, as it has been sufficient for some of the greatest men who
ever lived. Epicureanism in all its forms was alien to his nature.
"It is not true," he said at St. Andrews, "that goodness is
synonymous with happiness. The most perfect being who ever trod the
soil of this planet was called the Man of Sorrows. If happiness means
absence of care and inexperience of painful emotion, the best
securities for it are a hard heart and a good digestion. If morality
has no better foundation than a tendency to promote happiness, its
sanction is but a feeble uncertainty." Remembering where he stood,
and speaking from the fulness of his mind, Froude exclaimed: "Norman
Leslie did not kill Cardinal Beaton down in the castle yonder because
he was a Catholic, but because he was a murderer. The Catholics chose
to add to their already incredible creed a fresh article, that they
were entitled to hang and burn those who differed from them; and in
this quarrel the Calvinists, Bible in hand, appealed to the God of
battles."

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