Froude

THAT Mr. Paul is a strong writer the many readers of his History know. In Froude he has a spicy subject. He was sure to produce a lively book.¹

A singular character was Froude, and under a rather singular roof he was reared. His home is manifestly painted by himself in his Shadows of the Clouds, where Edward Fowler is evidently Froude himself, and Mr. Hardinge surely is Froude’s highly respectable and highly unattractive sire, Archdeacon Froude, though the allusion, if I remember rightly, was disclaimed at the time. Froude had much to endure, both at home and at a public school. As a child he had the great misfortune of being motherless. His father frowned, seldom spoke to him, set him to copy out Barrow’s sermons, wanted to get him off his hands, threatened to apprentice the boy, in whom literary tastes and genius had awakened early, to a tanner, and did send him to a school where he was bullied, no doubt with the usual effects of that detestable practice upon character. At home the boy was bullied by his elder brother, Richard Hurrell Froude, — the reputed originator of the Oxford Movement, compared by Dean Church to Pascal — who took him up by the heels and stirred with his head the mud at the bottom of a stream. The result of the treatment at home and at school was settled melancholy. The boy wondered why he had been brought into the world, and looked forward with complacency to an early death. He, however, consoled himself with study, and mastered Homer. At Oxford, believing that his life was to be short, he made it merry by living with a fast and idle set. Still, he read, took honors in classics, and was elected a fellow of Exeter College.

At Oxford Froude presently fell, as did the youthful sensibility of the place generally, under the spell of John Henry Newman. He could not have done better for his style as a writer, or much worse for his loyalty to truth. A seeker after truth, Newman, with all his spiritual aspirations and graces, never was. He set out, as he tells you, in the first of the Tracts for the Times, not to seek truth, but to find a new basis for clerical authority, which was threatened with subversion by the progress of the liberal movement. That new basis he found in Apostolical Succession and Real Presence. So by natural gradations he went on to Rome, having to use, by the way, not a little verbal artifice in reconciling with his Romeward tendencies his ostensible position as a minister of a Protestant church. His Grammar of Assent is, in fact, a manual of pious self-deception, teaching you how to accept for the good of your soul beliefs to which your reason demurs. Nor was he above rhetorical artifice. To Froude, who was writing for him the Life of Saint Neot, he says, “ Rationalize when the evidence is weak, and this will give credibility for others when you can show that the evidence is strong.” Of the literary graces of Newman’s school, Froude bore away a full measure. His style is eminently lucid, graceful, and attractive. In that respect there are few more fascinating writers.

Whatever Froude may have been in physique as a yachtsman or a hunter, in his intellectual temperament there seems to have been a feminine susceptibility of impression. From one influence he passed under another. Breaking a way from that of Newman, when Newman took the final plunge, he presently fell under the influence of Carlyle. In the interval there was a sort of vertigo, in which he wrote his Shadows of the Clouds and The Nemesis of Faith, the second of which cost him his Fellowship and membership of the college. His restoration to membership of the college many years afterwards marks the progress of liberalism in those years.

Carlyle, Fronde’s second master, was a good alterative for the age of the ballotbox; but he was never food. He, however, in choosing his heroes of force, did keep morality in sight: saving, perhaps, when he worshiped Frederick the Great. His pupil, in taking up with Henry VIII as his hero, bade farewell to any but heroic morality altogether.

Henry may have set out with good dispositions, as he certainly did with some popular qualities, rather of the physical kind; with a certain amount of culture, though his pamphlet against Luther is not reckoned a masterpiece; and with a taste for art, which, however, seems to have shown itself most in encouraging painting of portraits of an aggressively burly figure. But self-love and self-will presently got the upper hand, and, chafed by the struggle for the divorce, produced a suspicious, jealous, and bloody tyrant. Immunity for the King’s vices and crimes is claimed by Froude on the ground that his cause was that of the Reformation. His change from a zealous defender to a violent enemy of the Pope was the dictate of his lust, combined with his passionate desire of an heir. If the Pope could have granted him a divorce, he would have remained the vehement upholder of the personal infallibility of the Pope. His creed afterwards shifted with his policy and with the relative strength of parties in his council. To the great, gain of the Reformation, advance toward liberty of opinion, no one was ever less a friend than Henry VIII, unsettled and shifting as his own opinions were. It is surely vain to pretend that he was deliberately steering a religious revolution, or that he had any religious ideal apart, from his own policy and passion. It is true, he was fond of showing off his own theological learning. He displayed it by publicly disputing before a grand assembly in Westminster Hall with a poor Sacramentarian heretic. The poor Sacramentarian bravely avowed and upheld his faith. The king, of course, triumphed amid servile applause; then he sent his antagonist to be burned alive. Could there be a spark of generosity or nobleness in such a heart?

That Froude set out to write his history “ with a polemical purpose ” is frankly admitted by his biographer; and history written with a polemical purpose is apt not to be history, as Mr. Paul, himself an eminent historian, will admit. Froude was so far qualified for the part of the advocate, as contrasted with that of the historian proper, that he could assume the independence of the Tudor parliaments, and take the preambles of their statutes for trustworthy evidence on the side of the king; call the debasement of the currency a loan from the mint; believe that there was nothing wrong in repudiation, — nothing practically objectionable in putting people to death without trial.

The story of the divorce is well known. The king was tired of his wife, who was his senior; though good, was not charming; and had failed to give him a male heir. He had fallen in love with another woman. He was suddenly struck with a conscientious scruple about his marriage to his deceased brother’s widow. He solemnly declared to his people, whose heart was warmly with Catherine, that he loved her well, and that conscience alone constrained him to part with her. He nevertheless openly installed the other woman as a rival at Catherine’s side, and, when parting from her in alarm at the plague, wrote to her in language of the grossest lust. To relieve his troubled conscience by obtaining a divorce, he used chicanery, intrigue, bribery, and intimidation; twice tried to steal important documents; formed a plan of luring Catherine into a monastery, by getting her to take the monastic vow with him, then slipping out of the noose himself and leaving her bound. Through all this his admirer has to carry him, and the result, combined with what follows, is about the most curious of all sophistications of history. It is amusing, when the younger masters at Oxford decline a base compliance to which the more worldly seniors had submitted, to see Froude don the practical and sagacious man of the world, and rebuke the young masters as “a class which, defective alike in age, in wisdom, or in knowledge, was distinguished by a species of theoretic High Church fanaticism, and which, until it received its natural correction through advancing years, required from time to time to be protected against its own extravagance by some form of external pressure.” Pleasant is the allusion of the ex-Tractarian to High Church fanaticism! Still more pleasant is the suggestion of the author of the Nemesis of Faith, that when these young men grow older they will learn the wisdom of taking a lie upon their conscience at the command of tyrannical iniquity!

Catherine’s death was opportune, and deemed at the time suspicious, as Friedmann has shown. There could be no such thing as slow poison; but it seems there could be slow poisoning. The king did not conceal his joy; appeared in gay attire; the day after the arrival of the glad tidings gave a court ball; and sent, the little Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, to Mass with extraordinary pomp. Balls and jousts succeeded each other, and the court rang with gayety. Such was the report of the imperial ambassador, Chapuis, to his master, quoted by Friedmann, but not quoted here by Fronde.

Why does Fronde tell us nothing about Wolsey’s end: the vile ingratitude of the king to his great and only too faithful minister; the greedy sacking of the cardinal’s possessions, his furniture and plate, by the king and the harpy at his side? Why does he not tell us that Wolsey, while faithfully discharging his duty as archbishop in the north, was arrested on a colorable charge of treason, and was on his way to the block when he was snatched from it by death ? How are we to account for such an omission ? How but by Fronde’s own avowal in his Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, that he “does not pretend to impartiality” forasmuch as he “ believes the Reformation to have been the greatest incident in English history, the root and source of the expansive force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon Race over the globe, and imprinted the English genius and character on the constitution of mankind”? With little benefit surely to the veracity of mankind if Fronde’s genius is the genius of the Reformation.

Then came the turn of Anne Boleyn, who had ceased to please, and failed to give birth to a male heir. The king was courting Jane Seymour. Anne is suddenly arrested and charged with five adulteries, one of them incestuous, with her brother. Grief, the indictment said, had impaired the king’s health, and thus treasonably endangered his life; though his Majesty had never been more merry, and was openly courling Jane Seymour. The court, whatever Froude may think, was licentious; the king was making love to Anne’s rival; Anne was probably piqued; she was somewhat coarse; it is not unlikely that she indiscreetly, perhaps indecently, gave ear to the flatteries of young courtiers. But the indictment is monstrous. From one of the accused a confession was wrung, probably by fear of the rack. The others denied, and if they did not repeat the denial on the scaffold, freedom of speech on the scaffold was not allowed by the Crown, and the victims, had they indulged in it, would have exposed themselves to being hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason instead ot being beheaded, besides drawing the vengeance of the tyrant on their kin. The trial was not open, but held in a dark conclave of iniquity; and if the Duke of Norfolk, who presided, was kinsman of the accused, this was not the only case in the reign in which servility prevailed over nature. The Parliament to resettle the succession was called before the trial, showing clearly that the accused was foredoomed; and the day after the execution of his wife, probably the only woman whom he had really loved, the king married Jane Seymour. The “polemical” historian would have us believe that he did this as “an indifferent official act which his duty required.” If we disbelieve this, Froude finds it “in the statute book ”!

That Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn, had been the king’s mistress is proved, not by common report only, but by the form of dispensation sought at Rome for the projected marriage with Anne; and also by a clause in the Act resettling the succession, which, with evident reference to this case, brings carnal connection within the degrees of prohibited affinity. The divorce of the king from Anne was probably pronounced by Cranmer on that ground. The evidence of the Act Froude had before his eyes, but failed to see. Of the wording of the dispensation, when brought before him, he failed to see the force.

There is not a more beautiful character in history than that of Sir Thomas More, in whom the highest culture and the wisdom of the man of the world met with religious saintliness and the sweetest domestic affection. All Europe, Lutheran as well as Catholic, rang with indignation at his murder. Most desperately and pitifully does Froude labor to pervert our moral judgment in the case. He tries to prejudice us beforehand against More by sneering at More’s “ philosophic mercies, " and telling us that when “the learned Chancellor came into power, the Smithfield fires recommenced. ” This last statement is a calumny, for Erasmus, who must have known, declares that while More was chancellor not a single heretic suffered death. The one apparent exception, that of Bainham, seems to have been satisfactorily explained by Knight. More himself, a man of the strictest veracity, denied the charge, and his disclaimer is not the less, perhaps it is rather the more, credible, because, having been frightened by the excesses of the heretics out of his early liberalism, he had written against heresy, and styled himself haereticis molestus. Heresy was unhappily at that day a crime by the law of England, of which More was the head. Froude labors miserably to show that conscientious refusal to take an oath was an act of treason; and he is not ashamed to insinuate that, had the kingdom been invaded, More was ready to join the invaders. Talk about “the shot flying” as a justification for judicial murder is pure buncombe. Of the infamous means employed to decoy Fisher and More into compromising admissions, little, and that not true, will be learned from Froude. As Froude’s History begins abruptly with the fall of Wolsey, he escapes the pain of telling us that More had collaborated with the king in defense of the papacy, and had at that time seen so far into the king’s character as to reply, when he was congratulated on the favor he enjoyed, that he was grateful for it, but if his head would buy a castle in France, it would go. Froude’s tendency to sophistical tampering with fact is very visible in this case.

The monks of the Charter House were murdered on the same pretense as Fisher and More. Froude tries to drown our sense of justice in irrelevant sentimentalities about the three hundred at Thermopylæ “combing their golden hair.” The Carthusians would have found it difficult to comb their golden hair when they were kept chained upright to posts. Thomas Cromwell’s agent reports to him that “most of the monks will soon be despatched by God’s hand,” God’s hand being cruel confinement, filth, privation, and the torture of chaining upright.

Thomas Cromwell, next to Henry VIII, is Froude’s hero. In the glorious rôle of judicial murderers he may seek his peer. Froude holds that he was drawn by his supreme integrity to the Protestants, who were honest like himself: that he was the soul of the Reformation; and that he did God’s will, caring little whether he lived or died so long as God’s will was done. His very abject appeal for the king’s mercy at last showed a decided preference of life. A low adventurer, raised by his great ability, he wrought for the establishment of despotism in England, as William of Nogaret, the tool of Philip IV, had in France. The king, while using him, treated him as a menial, beknaving and cuffing him, as he himself confessed. His religion was purely political, and he owned himself a follower of Machiavel. He ruined himself at last by betraying his master into a marriage with a “Flemish mare,” which gave an advantage to his enemies in the Council. His arrest being sudden, he had not time to destroy his notebooks, among which were found these entries: —

Item, the Abbot of Reading to be sent down to be tried and executed at Reading with his complices.

Item, the Abbot of Glaston to be tried at Glaston, and also to be executed there with his complices.

Item, to see that the evidence be well sorted, and the evidence well drawn, against the said abbots and their complices.

Item, to remember specially the Lady of Sar [Salisbury].

Item, what, the King will have done with the Lady of Sarum.

Item, to send Gendon to the Tower to be racked.

Item, to appoint preachers to go throughout this realm to preach the gospel and true word of God.

Froude gives a good many documents. At these items he glances and does no more.

Cromwell fell, as is well known, under his own law enabling a man to be put to death without trial. The indictment, which, of course, like all other Tudor documents, according to Froude, demands our implicit faith, charges the most honest of men, amongst other things, with obtaining vast sums of money by bribery and extortion. But there is nothing in it which in reason could be regarded as a capital offense. Why did the author and head of the Reformation thus kill the soul of it. and the soul of honesty at the same time, for no assignable offense, and without the legal trial which even Froude thinks there ought perhaps in strictness to have been ? Why not listen to the abject prayer for life put up by the tool who had served him so well ? The explanation which suggests itself, not in this ease alone, is that Henry was a moral coward,and, when he had made a powerful man his enemy, feared to let him live.

To justify the plunder and destruction of the monasteries, Froude says: “It appears then on this authority that two thirds of the monks in England were living in habits which may not be described.” The “authority” is that of the spoilers. We have little trustworthy evidence. No doubt there were disorders, probably very gross disorders, though more in the lesser than in the greater houses. The hour of the whole system of asceticism had come. But Fronde’s statement is extravagant, and the Pilgrimage of Grace presently showed that the heart of the people over a large section of the country was still with the monasteries against the spoiler. How reckless the plundering was is shown by the fact that the tithes of parishes, impropriated by the monasteries, were not restored to the parishes, but swept into the booty. A part of the spoil was devoted to public purposes. But the greater part was consumed by the wastefulness of the court, which, let Froude say what he will, was extravagant; not a little, perhaps, by the king’s gambling table; for Henry, though his panegyrist does not mention it, was a great gambler. The government was soon reduced to a finance of repudiation, and what by ordinary economists is called “debasement of the currency,” by Froude a “loan from the mint.”

A special object of Froude’s historical antipathy is Cardinal Pole, Henry’s assailant in the European forum, whom he treats as a furious and criminal fanatic, covering him with ridicule as well as with abuse. Pole was a Catholic, holding the faith of which Henry had been a prominent champion; and even had he been a Protestant, he might have taken exception to the rending of the unity of Christendom and the assumption of the headship of the Church of Christ in his own country by such a man as Henry VIII, and from such a motive as that by which Henry was impelled. But turn to the authentic pages of Ranke, and you find Pole not a fanatic, but a moderate, an associate of Contarini, a member of the Oratory of Divine Love, striving with his associates to bring about a compromise between the Catholics and the Protestants on the basis of justification by faith. You find him recalled from the office of Legate in England by a violently reactionary pope, Paul IV, on account of the moderation of his policy, and his recall deplored by Paul’s wise and pacific successor, who believed that Pole’s moderate policy would have regained England. How far he was guilty of countenancing the burning of heretics under Mary is not clear. It was not he that burned them. Evil laws may have perverted his conscience, like the rest. He had been exasperated by the murder of his kin and by threats of assassination. Any insinuation that he had Cranmer put to death to open the door for himself to the archbishopric is baseless. Cranmer, having been attainted by the State and degraded by the Church, was ecclesiastically and civilly dead; so that there was nothing to prevent Pole from taking his place.

In picturesque narrative Froude excels. His masterpiece in that line, perhaps, is the meeting of Pole and Queen Mary, with the whole story of the wretched queen’s disappointment and tribulation; though, perhaps, gloating over the woman’s yearning for a child and anguish at her disappointment is not the most generous emotion to which it would be possible to appeal. Mary’s temper was soured by her father’s brutal treatment of her mother and herself. Her bigotry must have been confirmed at the same time. There is no reason to believe that she was naturally unamiable or specially disposed to persecution. She was not ill-favored till she was worn with sorrow. One motive for the divorce of Catherine and the murder of Anne was craving for a boy. Here, after all, was the girl upon the throne, embittered and made intolerant by her mother’s wrongs and her own.

Inaccuracy is unfortunate in a historian. That Froude was by nature inaccurate, even his admirers are forced to confess. In his West Indies and Oceana he misdescribes things which he had seen with his own eyes, depicting a sheet of water as tinted violet by the shadow of forest trees, whereas there were no forest trees within two miles of it. But the charge against him is not that of mere inaccuracy, which, perhaps, in the writer of a picturesque narrative, vividness of imagination might help to excuse. The charge is that of sophistication of history, “polemical’’ dealings with facts,and perversion of morality. That Froude’s prepossession was sincere, of course, is not questioned; but its effects were incompatible with truth. In the later volumes, the polemical purpose being pretty well exhausted, the brilliancy is less, but fact comparatively regains its sway.

Froude set out to write the history down to the death of Elizabeth. He stopped at the Armada. It is pretty clear that he had not studied the latter part of his subject when he wrote the first part. This is shown by the change in his treatment of the character of Elizabeth. Was he only weary, or is it possible that he may have begun to suspect the character and foresee the doom of his history of Henry VIII ?

Part of Mr. Paul’s volume is devoted to a lively encounter of Froude with Freeman, who attacked him with great vigor on historical points. Not having watched the controversy, I cannot say who came off victorious: Froude, I am sure, in style; Freeman, I should conjecture, in fact. Freeman was a peculiar being, an Anglo-Saxon without guile, a Thane who had stepped into the nineteenth century; blunt, rather grotesque, and apt to be peppery in debate. Coming to this country to lecture, he mistook the Americans for republicans, and adapted himself, as he fancied, to their rude republican simplicity. But he was honest and truthful to the core, a hearty lover of righteousness and hater of iniquity. As a writer he lacks art; he is diffuse and somewhat pedantic; not popular, and now, probably, save by earnest students, little read. But his profound erudition and his perfect conscientiousness make him master of the limited period of history to which he was specially devoted. Froude’s use of literary artifice and insinuation employed to pervert our sympathies in such cases as those of Fisher and More on the one side, and Thomas Cromwell on the other, would be sure to provoke Freeman to the utmost, and make him show, perhaps with too little reserve, his hatred of iniquity and falsehood.

When Froude goes to Ireland, he carries Carlyle with him, and decides political questions pretty much by the rule of the heavy fist, though he, of course, covers it with the kid glove of sentiment. He does injustice to the Irish by ascribing all the evil to their character. There are weak points in the Irish character, as there are in the character of every race; but these, if in some degree congenital, have been largely caused by unhappy influences, geographical and of other kinds, and by the accidents of a disastrous history. Mommsen’s bitter words about the Celt are not less irrational than bitter. Aristotle rightly holds that the kind is to be judged by its highest attainment, and it cannot be said that individuals of the Irish kind, or of the Celtic kind generally, have not attained a high level. Froude is always reproaching the Irish for not having fought; fighting being in his opinion the only mode of asserting the title of a race to independence and liberty. They did fight for several centuries, and were overpowered, not so much through inferiority in valor as by superior resources and arms. Fronde’s hero is Lord Clare, a strong man, without doubt, honest in his way, and sometimes presenting a favorable contrast to demagogic weakness; but a violent and narrow reactionist, of whose policy, except when repression was the need of the hour, no good could come. Froude’s English in Ireland is exceedingly fascinating in style and full of vivid delineation. Nor is it. by any means devoid of sound reflections. But it would never find its way into the hands and hearts of Irishmen, and could, therefore, as a lesson, do little good. In fact, it cut Ireland to the heart, and when Froude came over here to lecture. Hibernia, attached to the household of the friend whose guest Froude was, threatened to quit if he was not turned out of doors. Froude could not escape exaggeration. He exaggerates about the practice of abduction, and in this and other cases lays himself open to rebukes from Lecky; which, however, he might retort upon Lecky for Lecky’s treatment of Cromwell.

In Fronde’s Cæsar we were sure to find again Mommsen and the religion of force. Cæsar is, of course, the idol. Cicero and Cato are disparaged. Cicero and Cato, however, were clearly important factors in the eyes of Caesar. Cicero must surely be allowed to have combined to a wonderful and admirable extent the man of action with the man of thought. He was the most sincere, and not the least clear-sighted, though not the most powerful, of patriots. Intellectually he was not an original genius; yet, by the writings which he produced with wonderful facility amidst all the storms, he has been no small benefactor to civilization. Vanity, which was his weakness, was not so artfully veiled in those days as it is in ours. Cato, who is more especially the object of contemptuous treatment, appears in one of the two great Augustan poets as a political saint, in the other as a hero. Cæsar-worship, if it is anything more than a display of a sentimentalist’s virility, if it has any practical reference, is utterly misplaced. Roman nationality had come to its end. It had merged itself in a vast empire. That empire, like all empires, called for an emperor. For an empire Cæsar was the man. He was not the man for a nation. Nor was he, as a French writer calls him, altogether “the man of humanity.” His worshiper does not mention that he gave gladiatorial shows on a vast scale, that he cut off the hands of the garrison of a surrendered town, or that he carried about in chains his gallant enemy Vercingetorix, and then butchered him to grace his triumph. “The brave Vercingetorix,” says Fronde, “as noble in his calamity as Cæsar himself in his success, was reserved to be shown in triumph to the populace of Rome.” What was then done with him we are not told.

Of the miserable Carlyle episode nobody wants to hear any more. When Froude had those papers in his hands he was sure to do what he did. It would seem about time that the publication of such matter, and of private correspondence generally, should be restrained. The gratification of prurient curiosity is dearly purchased by that which impairs the freedom of friendly and confidential intercourse. As a rule, let any future friend of a deceased man of mark into whose hands a bundle of Carlyle papers comes piously consign them to the fire.