The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul

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The importance of this striking Address is largely due to the fact
that it was composed immediately after the History had been finished,
and may be regarded as an epilogue. It breathes the spirit, though it
discards the trappings, of Puritanism and the Reformation. Luther
"was one of the grandest men that ever lived on earth. Never was any
one more loyal to the light that was in him, braver, truer, or wider-
minded in the noblest sense of the word." About Calvinism Froude
disagreed with Carlyle, who loved to use the old formulas, though he
certainly did not use them in the old sense. "It is astonishing to
find," Froude wrote to Skelton, "how little in ordinary life the
Calvinists talked or wrote about doctrine. The doctrine was never
more than the dress. The living creature was wholly moral and
political--so at least I think myself." Such language was almost
enough to bring John Knox out of his grave. Could he have heard it,
he would have felt that he was being confounded with Maitland, who
thought God "ane nursery bogill." But though the attempt to represent
Knox or Calvin as undogmatic may be fanciful, it is the purest,
noblest, and most permanent part of Calvinism that Froude invited the
students of St. Andrews to cherish and preserve.

CHAPTER V

FROUDE AND FREEMAN

Froude's reputation as an historian was seriously damaged for a time
by the persistent attacks of The Saturday Review. It is difficult for
the present generation to understand the influence which that
celebrated periodical exercised, or the terror which it inspired,
forty years ago. The first editor, Douglas Cook, was a master of his
craft, and his colleagues included the most brilliant writers of the
day. Matthew Arnold, who was not one of them, paid them the
compliment of treating them as the special champions of Philistia,
the chosen garrison of Gath. On most subjects they were fairly
impartial, holding that there was nothing new and nothing true, and
that if there were it wouldn't matter. But the proprietor* of the
paper at that time was a High Churchman, and on ecclesiastical
questions he put forward his authority. Within that sphere he would
not tolerate either neutrality or difference of opinion. To him, and
to those who thought like him, Froude's History was anathema. Their
detested Reformation was set upon its legs again; Bishop Fisher was
removed from his pedestal; the Church of England, which since Keble's
assize sermon had been the Church of the Fathers, was shown to be
Protestant in its character and Parliamentary in its constitution.
The Oxford Movement seemed to be discredited, and that by a man who
had once been enlisted in its service. It was necessary that the
presumptuous iconoclast should be put down, and taught not to meddle
with things which were sacred.

--
* Alexander James Beresford Hope, some time member for the University
of Cambridge.
--

From the first The Saturday Review was hostile, but it was not till
1864 that the campaign became systematic. At that time the editor
secured the services of Edward Augustus Freeman, who had been for
several years a contributor on miscellaneous topics. Freeman is well
known as the historian of the Norman Conquest, as an active
politician, controversialist, and pamphleteer. Froude toiled for
months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost
illegible, carefully noting the caligraphy, and among the authors of
a joint composition assigning his proper share to each. Freeman wrote
his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time
engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or an
original document of any kind. Every historian must take his own
line, and the public are concerned not with processes, but with results.
I wish merely to point out the fact that, as between Froude
and Freeman, the assailed and the assailant, Froude was incomparably
the more laborious student of the two. It would be hard to say that
one historian should not review the work of another; but we may at
least expect that he should do so with sympathetic consideration for
the difficulties which all historians encounter, and should not pass
sentence until he has all the evidence before him. What were
Freeman's qualifications for delivering an authoritative judgment on
the work of Froude? Though not by any means so learned a man as his
tone of conscious superiority induced people to suppose, he knew his
own period very well indeed, and his acquaintance with that period,
perhaps also his veneration for Stubbs, had given him a natural
prejudice in favour of the Church. For the Church of the middle ages,
the undivided Church of Christ, was even in its purely mundane aspect
the salvation of society, the safeguard of law and order, the last
restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the wretched.

Historically, if not doctrinally, Freeman was a High Churchman, and
his ecclesiastical leanings were a great advantage to him in dealing
with the eleventh century. It was far otherwise when he came to write
of the sixteenth. If the Church of the sixteenth century had been
like the Church of the eleventh century, or the twelfth, or the
thirteenth, there would have been no Reformation, and no Froude.
Freeman lived, and loved, the controversial life. Sharing Gladstone's
politics both in Church and State, he was in all secular matters a
strong Liberal, and his hatred of Disraeli struck even Liberals as
bordering on fanaticism. Yet his hatred of Disraeli was as nothing to
his hatred of Froude. By nature "so over-violent or over-civil that
every man with him was God or devil," he had erected Froude into his
demon incarnate. Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong. He
detested Froude's opinions. He could not away with his style.
Freeman's own style was forcible, vigorous, rhetorical, hard; the
sort of style which Macaulay might have written if he had been a
pedant and a professor instead of a politician and a man of the
world. It was not ill suited for the blood-and-thunder sort of
reviewing to which his nature disposed him, and for the vengeance of
the High Churchmen he seemed an excellent tool.

Freeman's biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken
silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I think the Dean's
conduct was judicious. But there is no reason why a biographer of
Froude should follow his example. On the contrary, it is absolutely
essential that he should not; for Freeman's assiduous efforts, first
in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary, Review, did
ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that
Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless
of the truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more
about Freeman's qualifications for the task which he so lightly and
eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not
incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly
to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for
his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of
April, 1857 [1867?], "You have found me out about the sixteenth
century. I fancy that, from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get
credit for knowing more of those times than I do. But one can
belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are
quite right when you say that I have 'never thrown the whole force of
my mind on that portion of history.'"* These words pour a flood of
light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have
entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade. His object
was to belabour Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as
he says, "very small," but sufficient for enabling him to dispose
satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in
thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion, also writing
to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, "I find I have a
reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of
which I am profoundly ignorant."+

--
* Life and Letters of E. A. Freeman, vol. i. p. 381.
+ ibid. p. 382.
--

It does not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in
The Saturday Review to make people think that, as Froude's critic, he
deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private
disclaims.

Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After Freeman's
death his library was transferred to Owens College, Manchester, and
there, among his other books, is his copy of Froude's History. He
once said himself, in reference to his criticism of Froude, "In truth
there is no kind of temper in the case, but a strong sense of
amusement in bowling down one thing after another." Let us see. Here
are some extracts from his marginal notes. "A lie, teste Stubbs," as
if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any
more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original
documents. Another entry is "Beast," and yet another is "Bah!" "May I
live to embowel James Anthony Froude" is the pious aspiration with
which he has adorned another page. "Can Froude understand honesty?"
asks this anxious inquirer; and again, "Supposing Master Froude were
set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write
paradoxes, would he not curse his day?" Along with such graceful
compliments as "You've found that out since you wrote a book against
your own father," "Give him as slave to Thirlwall," there may be seen
the culminating assertion, "Froude is certainly the vilest brute that
ever wrote a book." Yet there was "no kind of temper in the case,"
and "only a strong sense of amusement." I suppose it must have amused
Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate
that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have
been a very bad temper indeed.

In this judicial frame of mind did Freeman set himself to review
successive volumes of Froude's Elizabeth. Froude did not always
correct his proofs with mechanical accuracy, and this gave Freeman an
advantage of which he was not slow to avail himself. "Mr. Froude," he
says in The Saturday Review for the 30th of January, 1864, "talks of
a French attack on Guienne, evidently meaning Guisnes. It is hardly
possible that this can be a misprint." It was of course a misprint,
and could hardly have been anything else. Guisnes was a town, and
could be attacked. Guienne was a province, and would have been
invaded. Guienne had been a French province since the Hundred Years'
War, and therefore the French would neither have attacked nor invaded
it. As if all this were not enough to show the nature and source of
the error, the word was correctly printed in the marginal heading. In
the same article, after quoting Froude's denial that a sentence
described by the Spanish Ambassador de Silva as having been passed
upon a pirate could have been pronounced in an English court of
justice, Freeman asked, "Is it possible that Mr. Froude has never
heard of the peine forte et dure?" Freeman of course knew it to be
impossible. He knew also that the peine forte et dure was inflicted
for refusing to plead, and that this pirate, by de Silva's own
account, had been found guilty. But he wanted to suggest that Froude
was an ignoramus, and for the purpose of beating a dog one stick is
as good as another.

Freeman's trump card, however, was the Bishop of Lexovia, and that
brilliant victory he never forgot. Froude examined the strange and
startling allegation, cited by Macaulay in his introductory chapter,
that during the reign of Henry VIII. seventy-two thousand persons
perished by the hand of the public executioner. He traced it to the
Commentaries of Cardan, an astrologer, not a very trustworthy
authority, who had himself heard it, he said, from "an unknown Bishop
of Lexovia." "Unknown," observed Freeman, with biting sarcasm, "to no
one who has studied the history of Julius Caesar or of Henry II."
Froude had not been aware that Lexovia was the ancient name for the
modern Lisieux, and for twenty years he was periodically reminded of
the fact. Had he followed Freeman's methods, he might have asked
whether his critic really supposed that there were bishops in the
time of Julius Caesar. Freeman failed to see that the point was not
the modern name of Lexovia, but the number of persons put to death by
Henry, on which Froude had shown the worthlessness of popular
tradition.

Bishop Hooper was burnt at Gloucester in the Cathedral Close. Froude
describes the scene of the execution as "an open space opposite the
College." That shows, says Freeman, that Froude did not, like
Macaulay, visit the scenes of the events he described. Perhaps he did
not visit Gloucester, or even Guisnes. That Freeman's general
conclusion was entirely wide of the mark a single letter from Froude
to Skelton is enough to show. "I want you some day," he wrote on the
12th of December, 1863, "to go with me to Loch Leven, and then to
Stirling, Perth, and Glasgow. Before I go farther I must have a
personal knowledge of Loch Leven Castle and the grounds at Langside.
Also I must look at the street at Linlithgow where Murray was shot."*
Thus Freeman's amiable inference was the exact reverse of the truth.

--
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 131.
--

Some of Freeman's methods, however, were a good deal less scrupulous
than this. By way of bringing home to Froude "ecclesiastical
malignity of the most frantic kind," he cited the case of Bishop
Coxe. "To Hatton," Froude wrote in his text,+ "was given also the
Naboth's vineyard of his neighbour the Bishop of Ely." In a long note
he commented upon the Bishop's inclination to resist, and showed how
the "proud prelate" was "brought to reason by means so instructive on
Elizabeth's mode of conducting business when she had not Burghley or
Walsingham to keep her in order that" the whole account is given at
length in the words of Lord North, whom she employed for the purpose.
This letter from Lord North is extremely valuable evidence. Froude
read it and transcribed it from the collection of manuscripts at
Hatfield. As an idle rumour that Froude spent only one day at
Hatfield obtained currency after his death, it may be convenient to
mention here that the work which he did there in copying manuscripts
alone must have occupied him at least a month. Now let us see what
use Freeman made of the information thus given him by Froude.
"Meanwhile," he says in The Saturday Review for the 22nd of January,
1870, "Mr. Froude is conveniently silent as to the infamous tricks
played by Elizabeth and her courtiers in order to make estates for
court favourites out of Episcopal lands. A line or two of text is
indeed given to the swindling transaction by which Bishop Coxe of Ely
was driven to surrender his London house to Sir Christopher Hatton.
But why? Because the story gives Mr. Froude an opportunity of quoting
at full length a letter from Lord North to the Bishop in which all
the Bishop's real or pretended enormities are strongly set forth."
Here follows a short extract from the letter, in which North accused
Coxe of grasping covetousness. Now it is perfectly obvious to any one
having the whole letter before him, as Freeman had, that Froude
quoted it with the precisely opposite aim of denouncing the conduct
of Elizabeth to the Bishop, whom he compares with Naboth. Freeman
must have heard of Naboth. He must have known what Froude meant. Yet
the whole effect of his comments must have been to make the readers
of The Saturday Review think that Froude was attacking the Church,
when he was attacking the Crown for its conduct to the Church.

--
+ History of England, vol. xi. p. 321.
--

Freeman seemed to glory in his own deficiencies, and was almost as
proud of what he did not know as of what he did. Thus, for instance,
Froude, a born man of letters, was skilful and accomplished in the
employment of metaphors. Freeman could no more handle a metaphor than
he could fish with a dry fly. He therefore, without the smallest
consciousness of being absurd, condemned Froude for doing what he was
unable to do himself, and even wrote, in the name of The Saturday
Review, "We are no judges of metaphors," though there must surely
have been some one on the staff who knew something about them.

Froude had a mode of treating documents which is open to
animadversion. He did not, as Mr. Pollard happily puts it in the
Dictionary of National Biography, "respect the sanctity of inverted
commas." They ought to imply textual quotation, Froude used them for
his abridgments, openly proclaiming the fact that he had abridged,
and therefore deceiving no one. Freeman's comment upon this
irregularity is extremely characteristic. "Now we will not call this
dishonest; we do not believe that Mr. Froude is intentionally
dishonest in this or any other matter; but then it is because he does
not know what literary honesty and dishonesty are." There is no such
thing as literary honesty, or scientific honesty, or political
honesty. There is only one kind of honesty, and an honest man does
not misrepresent an opponent, as Freeman misrepresented Froude. To
call a man a liar is an insult. To say that is not a liar because he
does not know the difference between truth and falsehood is a
cowardly insult. But Froude was soon avenged. Freeman gave himself
into his adversary's hands. "Sometimes," he wrote,* "Mr. Froude gives
us the means of testing him. Let us try a somewhat remarkable
passage. He tells us "It had been argued in the Admiralty Courts that
the Prince of Orange, 'having his principality of his title in
France, might make lawful war against the Duke of Alva,* and that the
Queen would violate the rules of neutrality if she closed her ports
against his cruisers." Then follows a Latin passage from which the
English is paraphrased. "We presume," continues Freeman in fancied
triumph, "that the words put by Mr. Froude in inverted commas are
not Lord Burghiey's summary of the Latin extract in the note, but Mr.
Froude's own, for it is utterly impossible that Burghley could have
so misconceived a piece of plain Latin, or have so utterly
misunderstood the position of any contemporary prince." Presumption
indeed. I have before me a photograph of Burghley's own words in his
own writing examined by Froude at the Rolls House. They are "Question
whether the Prince of Orange, being a free prince of the Empire, and
also having his principality of his title in France, might not make a
just war against the Duke of Alva." Froude abridged, and wrote
"lawful" for "just." But the words which Freeman says that Burghley
could not have used are the words which he did use, and the
explanation is simple enough. Freeman was Freeman. Burghley was a
statesman. Burghley of course knew perfectly well that Orange was not
subject to the King of France, not part of his dominions, which is
Freeman's objection. He called it in France because it, and the Papal
possessions of Venaissin adjoining it, were surrounded by French
territory. He called it "in France," as we should call the Republic
of San Marino "in Italy" now. Freeman might have ascertained what
Burghley did write if he had cared to know. He did not care to know.
He was "belabouring Froude."

--
* Saturday Review, Nov. 24th, 1866.
--

Once Froude was weak enough to accept Freeman's correction on a small
point, only to find that Freeman was entirely in error, and that he
himself had been right all along. After much vituperative language
not worth repeating, Freeman wrote in The Saturday Review for the 5th
of February, 1870, these genial words, "As it is, there is nothing to
be done but to catch Mr. Froude whenever he comes from his hiding-
place at Simancas into places in which we can lie in wait for him."
The sneer at original research is characteristic of Freeman. One can
almost hear his self-satisfied laugh as he wrote this unlucky
sentence, "The thing is too grotesque to talk about seriously; but
can we trust a single uncertified detail from the hands of a man who
throughout his story of the Armada always calls the Ark Royal the Ark
Raleigh? ... It is the sort of blunder which so takes away one's
breath that one thinks for the time that it must be right. We do not
feel satisfied till we have turned to our Camden and seen 'Ark Regis'
staring us full in the face." Freeman did not know the meaning of
historical research as conducted by a real scholar like Froude.
Froude had not gone to Camden, who in Freeman's eyes represented the
utmost stretch of Elizabethan learning. If Freeman had had more
natural shrewdness, it might have occurred to him that the name of a
great seaman was not an unlikely name for a ship. But he could never
fall lightly, and heavily indeed did he fall on this occasion. With
almost incredible fatuity, he wrote, "The puzzle of guessing how
Mr. Froude got at so grotesque a union of words as 'Ark Raleigh'
fades before the greater puzzle of guessing what idea he attached to
the words 'Ark Raleigh' when he had got them together." When Freeman
was most hopelessly wrong he always began to parody Macaulay.
Corruptio optimi pessima. "Ark Raleigh" means Raleigh's ship, and
Froude took the name, "Ark Rawlie" as it was then spelt, from the
manuscripts at the Rolls House. He was of course right, and Freeman
was wrong. But that is not all. Freeman could easily have put himself
right if he had chosen to take the trouble. Edwards's Life of Raleigh
appeared in 1868, and a copy of it is in Freeman's library at Owens
College. Edwards gives an account of the Ark Raleigh, which was built
for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh advancing two hundred pounds.
Freeman, however, need not have read this book to find out the truth.
For "the Ark Raleigh" occurs fourteen times in a Calendar of
Manuscripts from 1581 to 1590, published by Robert Lemon in 1865.
When Freeman was brought to book, and taxed with this gross blunder,
he pleaded that he "did a true verdict give according to such
evidence as came before him." The implied analogy is misleading.
Jurymen are bound by their oaths, and by their duty, to find a
verdict one way or the other. Freeman was under no obligation to say
anything about the Ark Raleigh. Prudence and ignorance might well
have restrained his pen.

Two blots in Froude's History Freeman may, I think, be acknowledged
to have hit. One was intellectual; the other was moral. It was pure
childishness to suggest that Froude had never heard of the peine
forte et dure, and only invincible prejudice could have dictated such
a sentence as "That Mr. Froude's law would be queer might be taken as
a matter of course."* Still, it is true, and a serious misfortune,
that Froude took very little interest in legal and constitutional
questions. For, while they had not the same importance in the
sixteenth century as they had in the seventeenth, they cannot be
disregarded to the extent in which Froude disregarded them without
detracting from the value of his book as a whole. He did not sit
down, like Hallam, to write a constitutional history, and he could
not be expected to deal with his subject from that special point of
view. Freeman's complaint, which is quite just, was that he neglected
almost entirely the relations of the Crown with the Houses of
Parliament and with the courts of law. The moral blot accounts for a
good deal of the indignation which Froude excited in minds far less
jaundiced than Freeman's. No one hated injustice more than Froude.
But cruelty as such did not inspire him with any horror. No
punishment, however atrocious, seemed to him too great for persons
clearly guilty of enormous crimes. I have already referred to his
defence of the horrible Boiling Act which disgraced the reign and the
parliament of Henry VIII. The account of Mary Stuart's old and
wizened face as it appeared when her false hair and front had been
removed after her execution may be set down as an error of taste. But
what is to be said, on the score of humanity, for an historian who in
the nineteenth century calmly and in cold blood defended the use of
the rack? Even here Freeman's ingenuity of suggestion did not desert
him. After quoting part, and part only, of Froude's sinister apology,
he writes, "To all this the answer is very simple. Every time that
Elizabeth and her counsellors sent a prisoner to the rack they
committed a breach of the law of England."+ Any one who read this
article without reading the History would infer that Froude had
maintained the legality, as well as the expediency, of torture. That
is not true. What Froude says is, "A practice which by the law was
always forbidden could be palliated only by a danger so great that
the nation had become like an army in the field. It was repudiated on
the return of calmer times, and the employment of it rests a stain on
the memory of those by whom it was used. It is none the less certain,
however, that the danger was real and terrible, and the same causes
which relieve a commander in active service from the restraints of
the common law apply to the conduct of statesmen who are dealing with
organised treason. The law is made for the nation, not the nation for
the law. Those who transgress it do it at their own risk, but they
may plead circumstances at the bar of history, and have a right to be
heard." Thus Froude asserts as strongly and clearly as Freeman
himself that torture was in 1580, and always had been, contrary to
the law of England. On the purely legal and technical aspect of the
question a point might be raised which neither Froude nor Freeman has
attempted to solve. Would any Court in the reign of Elizabeth have
convicted a man of a criminal offence for carrying out the express
commands of the sovereign? If not, in what sense was the racking of
the Jesuits illegal? But there is a law of God, as well as a law of
man, and surely Elizabeth broke it. Froude's argument seems to prove
too much, if it proves anything, for it would justify all the worst
cruelties ever inflicted by tyrants for political objects, from the
burning of Christians who refused incense for the Roman Emperor to
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel.

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