The Life of Froude Part 4

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 surpa.s.sed 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 G.o.d be a delusion and man be as the beasts that perish. For it is but the inflas.h.i.+ng 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 att.i.tude 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 ent.i.tled to hang and burn those who differed from them; and in this quarrel the Calvinists, Bible in hand, appealed to the G.o.d of battles."

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 n.o.blest 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d "ane nursery bogill." But though the attempt to represent Knox or Calvin as undogmatic may be fanciful, it is the purest, n.o.blest, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.size sermon had been the Church of the Fathers, was shown to be Protestant in its character and Parliamentary in its const.i.tution. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 ma.n.u.scripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the caligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition a.s.signing 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 ma.n.u.script or an original doc.u.ment 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 a.s.sailed and the a.s.sailant, 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.siduous efforts, first in The Sat.u.r.day, and afterwards in The Contemporary, Review, did ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and const.i.tutionally 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-a.s.sertion, was not incapable of candour. He was staunch in friends.h.i.+p, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 doc.u.ments. 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 a.s.sertion, "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 amus.e.m.e.nt." 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Amba.s.sador de Silva as having been pa.s.sed upon a pirate could have been p.r.o.nounced 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+rley, 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 c.o.xe. "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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 c.o.xe 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 c.o.xe 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 doc.u.ments which is open to animadversion. He did not, as Mr. Pollard happily puts it in the Dictionary of National Biography, "respect the sanct.i.ty 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 pa.s.sage. He tells us "It had been argued in the Admiralty Courts that the Prince of Orange, 'having his princ.i.p.ality of his t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sage 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 princ.i.p.ality of his t.i.tle 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."

- * Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p, and Froude took the name, "Ark Rawlie" as it was then spelt, from the ma.n.u.scripts 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 Ma.n.u.scripts 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 a.n.a.logy 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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 circ.u.mstances at the bar of history, and have a right to be heard." Thus Froude a.s.serts 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 G.o.d, 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.

- * Sat.u.r.day Review, Jan. 29th, 1870.

+ Sat.u.r.day Review, Dec. 1st, 1867.

- The a.n.a.logy of a commander in active service is inadequate. Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for the rack. In a pa.s.sage which must always disfigure his book he thus describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with him in 1586. "They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due precautions for the protraction of the pain. If it was to be taken as part of the Catholic creed that to kill a prince in the interests of Holy Church was an act of piety and merit, stern English common sense caught the readiest means of expressing its opinion on the character both of the creed and its professors."

Stern English common sense! To suggest that the English people had anything to do with it is a libel on the English nation. Elizabeth had the decency to forbid the repet.i.tion of such atrocities. That she should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude's.

On the 12th of January, 1870, Freeman delivered in The Sat.u.r.day Review his final verdict on Froude's History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is one of the most preposterous judgments that ever found their way into print. In knowledge of the subject, and in patient a.s.siduity of research, Froude was immeasurably Freeman's superior, and his life had been devoted to historic studies. Yet this was the language in which the editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died: "He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name has come to be used as a figure of speech, sometimes in strange company with his betters .... But an historian he is not; four volumes of ingenious paradox, eight volumes of ecclesiastical pamphlet, do not become a history, either because of the mere number of volumes, or because they contain a narrative which gradually shrinks into little more than a narrative of diplomatic intrigues. The main objections to Mr. Froude's book, the blemishes which cut it off from any t.i.tle to the name of history, are utter carelessness as to facts and utter incapacity to distinguish right from wrong .... That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth-the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the name, cannot be written-is not in Mr. Froude's nature, and it would probably be impossible to make him understand what it is .... How far the success of the book is due to its inherent vices, how far to its occasional virtues, is a point too knotty for us to solve. The general reader and his tastes-why this thing pleases him and the other thing displeases him-have ever been to us the proroundest of mysteries. It is enough that on Mr. Froude's book, as a whole, the verdict of all competent historical scholars has long ago been given. Occasional beauties of style and narrative cannot be allowed to redeem carelessness of truth, ignorance of law, contempt for the first principles of morals, ecclesiastical malignity of the most frantic kind. There are parts of Mr. Froude's volumes which we have read with real pleasure, with real admiration. But the book, as a whole, is vicious in its conception, vicious in its execution. No merit of detail can atone for the hollowness that runs through the whole. Mr. Froude has written twelve volumes, and he has made himself a name in writing them, but he has not written, in the pregnant phrase so aptly quoted by the Duke of Aumale, 'un livre de bonne foy.'"*

- * The Duke was not, as Freeman implies that he was, referring to Froude. -

By a curious irony of fate or circ.u.mstance Freeman has unconsciously depicted the frame of mind in which Froude approached historic problems. "That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth-the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the name, cannot be written," was the dominant principle of Froude's life and work. He had hitherto taken no notice of the attacks in The Sat.u.r.day Review. The errors pointed out in them were of the most trivial kind, and mere abuse is not worth a reply. But even Gibbon was moved from his philosophic calm when Mr. Somebody of Something "presumed to attack not the faith but the fidelity of the historian." Froude pa.s.sed over in contemptuous silence impertinent reflections upon his religious belief. His honesty was now in set terms impugned, and on the 15th of February, 1870, he addressed, through the editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, Mr. Frederick Greenwood, a direct challenge to Mr. Philip Harwood, who had become editor of The Sat.u.r.day Review. After a few caustic remarks upon the absurdity of the defects imputed to him, such as ignorance that Parliament could pa.s.s Bills of Attainder, because he had said that the House of Lords would not pa.s.s one in a particular case, he came to close quarters with the imputation of bad faith. "I am," he said, "peculiarly situated"-as Freeman of course knew-"towards a charge of this kind, for nine-tenths of my doc.u.ments are in ma.n.u.script, and a large proportion of those ma.n.u.scripts are in Spain. To deal as fairly as I can with the public, I have all along deposited my Spanish transcripts, as soon as I have done with them, in the British Museum. The reading of ma.n.u.scripts, however, is at best laborious. The public may be inclined to accept as proved an uncontradicted charge, the value of which they cannot readily test. I venture therefore to make the following proposal. I do not make it to my reviewer. He will be reluctant to exchange communications with me, and the disinclination will not be on his side only. I address myself to his editor. If the editor will select any part of my volumes, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred pages, wherever he pleases, I am willing to subject them to a formal examination by two experts, to be chosen-if Sir Thomas Hardy will kindly undertake it-by the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records. They shall go through my references, line for line. They shall examine every doc.u.ment to which I have alluded, and shall judge whether I have dealt with it fairly. I lay no claim to be free from mistakes. I have worked in all through nine hundred volumes of letters, notes, and other papers, private and official, in five languages and in difficult handwritings. I am not rash enough to say that I have never misread a word, or overlooked a pa.s.sage of importance. I profess only to have dealt with my materials honestly to the best of my ability. I submit myself to a formal trial, of which I am willing to bear the entire expense, on one condition-that the report, whatever it be, shall be published word for word in The Sat.u.r.day Review."

The proposal was certainly a novel one, and could not in ordinary circ.u.mstances have been accepted. But it is also novel to charge an historian of the highest character and repute with inability to speak the truth, or to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman, signing himself "Mr. Froude's Sat.u.r.day Reviewer," replied in The Pall Mall Gazette. The challenge he left to the editor of The Sat.u.r.day, who contemptuously refused it, and he admitted that after all Froude probably did know what a Bill of Attainder was. The rest of his letter is a shuffle. "I have made no charge of bad faith against Mr. Froude"-whom he had accused of not knowing what truth meant-"with regard to any Spanish ma.n.u.scripts, or any other ma.n.u.scripts. All that I say is, that as I find gross inaccuracies in Mr. Froude's book, which he does not whenever I have the means of testing him which was certainly not often-"I think there is a presumption against his accuracy in those parts where I have not the means of testing him. But this is only a presumption, and not proof. Mr. Froude may have been more careful, or more lucky"-meaning less fraudulent, or more skilful-"with the hidden wealth of Simancas than he has been with regard to materials which are more generally accessible. I trust it may prove so." If Freeman thought that he meant that, he must have had singular powers of self-deception. "I have been twitted by men of thought and learning"-whom he does not name-"for letting Mr. Froude off too easily, and I am inclined to plead guilty to the charge. I do not suppose that Mr. Froude wilfully misrepresents anything; the fault seems to be inherent and incurable; he does not know what historical truth is, or how a man should set about looking for it. As therefore his book is not written with that regard for truth with which a book ought to be written, I hold that I am justified in saying that it is not 'un livre de bonne roy.'"

It is difficult to read this disingenuous farrago of insinuation even now without a strong sense of moral contempt. But vengeance was coming, and before many years were over his head Freeman had occasion to remember the Hornfinn tag:

Raro antecedentem scelestum Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Froude himself took the matter very lightly. He had boldly offered the fullest inquiry, and Freeman had not been clever enough to shelter himself behind the plea that copies were not originals; he did not know enough about ma.n.u.scripts to think of it. The blunders he had detected were trifling, and Froude summed up the labours of his antagonists fairly enough in a letter to Skelton from his beloved Derreen.* "I acknowledge to five real mistakes in the whole book- twelve volumes-about twenty trifling slips, equivalent to i's not dotted and t's not crossed; and that is all that the utmost malignity has discovered. Every one of the rascals has made a dozen blunders of his own, too, while detecting one of mine." Skelton's own testimony is worth citing, for, though a personal friend, he was a true scholar. "We must remember that he was to some extent a pioneer, and that he was the first (for instance) to utilise the treasures of Simancas. He transcribed, from the Spanish, ma.s.ses of papers which even a Spaniard could have read with difficulty, and I am a.s.sured that his translations (with rare exceptions) render the original with singular exactness."+ And in the preface to his Maitland of Lethington the same distinguished author says, "Only the man or woman who has had to work upon the ma.s.s of Scottish material in the Record Office can properly appreciate Mr. Froude's inexhaustible industry and substantial accuracy. His point of view is very different from mine; but I am bound to say that his acquaintance with the intricacies of Scottish politics during the reign of Mary appears to me to be almost, if not quite, unrivalled." John Hill Burton, to whose learning and judgment Freeman's were as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine, concurred in Skelton's view, and no one has ever known Scottish history better than Burton.

- * June 21st, 1870.

+ Table Talk of s.h.i.+rley, p. 143.

- Freeman's reckless and unscholarly attacks upon Froude produced no effect upon his own master Stubbs, whom he was always covering with adulation. From the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1876 Stubbs p.r.o.nounced Froude's "great book," as he called it, to be "a work of great industry, power, and importance." Stubbs was as far as possible from agreeing with Froude in opinion. An orthodox Churchman and a staunch Tory, he never varied in his opposition to Liberalism, as well ecclesiastical as political, and he had no sympathy with the reformers. But his simple, manly, pious character was incapable of supporting his cause by personal slander. Unlike Freeman, he had a rich vein of racy humour, which he indulged in a famous epigram on Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation. But he could appreciate Froude's learning and industry, for he was a real student himself.

The controversy between Froude and Freeman, however, was by no means at an end, and I may as well proceed at once to the conclusion of it, chronology notwithstanding. In the year 1877, Froude contributed to The Nineteenth Century a series of papers on the Life and Times of Thomas Becket, since republished in the fourth volume of his Short Studies. Full of interesting information, the result of minute pains, and excellent in style, they make no pretence to be, as the History was, a work of original research. They are indeed founded upon the Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, which Canon Robertson had edited for the Master of the Rolls in the previous year. They were of course read by every one, because they were written by Froude, whereas Robertson's learned Introduction would only have been read by scholars. Froude's conclusions were much the same as the erudite Canon's. He did not pretend to know the twelfth century as he knew the sixteenth, and he avowedly made use of another man's knowledge to point his favourite moral that emanc.i.p.ation from ecclesiastical control was a necessary stage in the development of English freedom. He may have been unconsciously affected by his familiarity with the quarrel between Wolsey and Henry VIII. in describing the quarrel between Becket and Henry II. The Church of the middle ages discharged invaluable functions which in later times were more properly undertaken by the State. Froude sided with Henry, and showed, as he had not much difficulty in showing, that there were a good many spots on the robe of Becket's saintliness. The immunity of Churchmen, that is, of clergymen, from the jurisdiction of secular tribunals was not conducive either to morality or to order.

Froude's essays might have been forgotten, like other brilliant articles in other magazines, if Freeman had let them alone. But the spectacle of Froude presuming to write upon those earlier periods of which The Sat.u.r.day Review had so often and so dogmatically p.r.o.nounced him to be ignorant, drove Freeman into print. If he had disagreed with Froude on the main question, the only question which matters now, he would have been justified, and more than justified, in setting out the opposite view. A defence of Becket against Henry, of the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer, would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as Froude's own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and Erastianism. There is a great deal more to be said for Becket than for Wolsey; and though Freeman found it difficult to state any case with temperance, he could have stated this case with power. But, much as he disliked Froude, he agreed with him. "Looking," he wrote, "at the dispute between Henry and Thomas by the light of earlier and of later ages, we see that the cause of Henry was the right one; that is, we see that it was well that the cause of Henry triumphed in the long run." Nevertheless he rushed headlong upon his victim, and "belaboured" Froude, with all the violence of which he was capable, in The Contemporary Review. Hitherto his attacks had been anonymous. Now for the first time he came into the open, and delivered his a.s.sault in his own name. Froude's forbearance, as well as his own vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring. The first sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance. "Mr. Froude's appearance on the field of mediaeval history will hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval history one of the chief studies of their lives." Freeman's pedantry was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history belonged to particular historians. Before writing about Becket Froude should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the Rolls Series. That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique. For Froude's style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to Freeman, "had," as he kindly admitted, "its merits." Page after page teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings. "On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of More and Fisher"; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question not of morality, but of evidence. "Mr. Froude by his own statement has not made history the study of his life," which was exactly what he had done, and stated that he had done. "The man who insisted on the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill of Attainder."

Freeman could not even be consistent in abuse for half a page. Immediately after charging Froude with "fanatical hatred towards the English Church, reformed or unreformed"-though he was the great champion of the Reformation-"a degree of hatred which must be peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it"- like Freeman's bosom friend Green-he says that Froude "never reaches so high a point as in several pa.s.sages where he describes various scenes and features of monastic life." But this could not absolve him from having made a "raid" upon another man's period, from being a "marauder," from writing about a personage whom Stubbs might have written about, though he had not. Froude had "an inborn and incurable twist, which made it impossible for him to make an accurate statement about any matter." "By some destiny which it would seem that he cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds-at least which all other readers find-in his book he invariably subst.i.tutes another narrative out of his own head." "Very few of us can test ma.n.u.scripts at Simancas; it is not every one who can at a moment's notice test references to ma.n.u.scripts much nearer home." This is a strange insinuation from a man who never tested a ma.n.u.script, seldom, if ever, consulted a ma.n.u.script, and had declined Froude's challenge to let his copies be compared with his abridgment. One grows tired of transcribing a mere succession of innuendoes. Yet it is essential to clear this matter up once and for all, that the public may judge between Froude and his life-long enemy.

The standard by which Freeman affected to judge Froude's articles in The Nineteenth Century was fantastic. "Emperors and Popes, Sicilian Kings and Lombard Commonwealths, should be as familiar to him who would write The Life and Times of Thomas Becket as the text of the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon or the relations between the Sees of Canterbury and York." If Froude had written an elaborate History of Henry II., as he wrote a History of Henry VIII., he would have qualified himself in the manner somewhat bombastically described. But even Lord Acton, who seemed to think that he could not write about anything until he knew everything, would scarcely have prepared himself for an article in The Nineteenth Century by mastering the history of the world. And if Froude had done so, it would have profited him little. He would have forgotten it, "with that calm oblivion of facts which distinguishes him from all other men who have taken on themselves to read past events." He would still have written "whatever first came into his head, without stopping to see whether a single fact bore his statements out or not." "Accurate statement of what really happened, even though such accurate statement might serve Mr. Froude's purpose, is clearly forbidden by the destiny which guides Mr. Froude's literary career." These extracts from The Contemporary Review are samples, and only samples, from a ma.s.s of rhetoric not unworthy of the grammarian who prayed for the d.a.m.nation of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of irregular verbs. Freeman, whose self-a.s.sertion was perpetual, represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of truth. His own reverence for truth he ill.u.s.trated quaintly enough at the close of his last article. "I leave others to protest," said this veracious critic, "against Mr. Froude's treatment of the sixteenth century. I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from original sources." I leave others to protest! From 1864 to 1870 Freeman had continuously attacked successive volumes of Froude's History in The Sat.u.r.day Review. Yet he here makes in his own name a statement quite irreconcilable with his ever having done anything of the kind, and accompanies it with an admission which, if it had been made in The Sat.u.r.day Review, would have robbed his invective of more than half its sting.

And now let us see what was the real foundation for this imposing fabric. Freeman's boisterous truculence made such a deafening noise, and raised such a blinding dust, that it takes some little time and trouble to discover the hollowness of the charges. With four-fifths of Froude's narrative he does not deal at all, except to borrow from it for his own purposes, as he used to borrow from the History in The Sat.u.r.day Review. In the other fifth, the preliminary pages, he discovered two misprints of names, one mistake of fact, and three or four exaggerations. Not one of these errors is so grave as his own statement, picked up from some bad lawyer, that "the preamble of an Act of Parliament need not be received as of any binding effect." The preamble is part of the Act, and gives the reasons why the Act was pa.s.sed. Of course the rules of grammar show that being explanatory it is not an operative part; but it can be quoted in any court of justice to explain the meaning of the clauses.

In his Annals of an English Abbey Froude allowed "Robert Fitzwilliam" to pa.s.s for Robert Fitzwalter in his proofs, and upon this conclusive evidence that Froude was unfit to write history Freeman pounced with triumphant exultation. He had some skill in the correction of misprints, and would have been better employed in revising proof- sheets for Froude than in "belabouring" him. Froude said that Becket's name "denoted Saxon extraction." An anonymous biographer, not always accurate, says that both his parents came from Normandy. It is probable, though by no means certain, that in this case the biographer was right, and Froude corrected the mistake when, in consequence of Freeman's criticisms, he republished the articles. Froude, on the authority of Edward Grim, who knew Becket, and wrote his Life, referred to the cruelty and ferocity of Becket's administration as Chancellor. Freeman declared that "anything more monstrous never appeared from the pen of one who professed to be narrating facts." Froude not only "professed" to be narrating facts: he was narrating them. The only question is whether they happened in England, in Toulouse, or in Aquitaine. Freeman exposed his own ignorance by alleging that Grim meant the suppression of the free lances, which happened before Becket became Chancellor. He did not in fact know the subject half so well as Froude, though Froude might have more carefully qualified his general words. Froude's account of Becket's appointment to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, his scruples, and how he overcame them, is described by Freeman as "pure fiction." It was taken from William of Canterbury, and, though open to doubt upon some points, is quite as likely to be true as the narrative preferred by Freeman. The most serious error, indeed the only serious error, attributed by Freeman to Froude is the statement that Becket's murderers were s.h.i.+elded from punishment by the King. Freeman alleges with his usual confidence that they could not be tried in a secular court because their victim was a bishop. It is doubtful whether a lay tribunal ever admitted such a plea, and the Const.i.tutions of Clarendon, which were in force at the time of Becket's a.s.sa.s.sination, abolished clerical privileges altogether. Here Froude was almost certainly right, and Freeman almost certainly wrong.

But Freeman was not content with making mountains of mole-hills, with speaking of a great historian as if he were a pretentious dunce. He stooped to write the words, "Natural kindliness, if no other feeling, might have kept back the fiercest of partisans from ignoring the work of a long-forgotten brother, and from dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost forgotten fame." The meaning of this sentence, so far as it has a meaning, was that Hurrell Froude composed a fragment on the Life of Becket which the mistaken kindness of friends published after his own premature death. If Froude had written anonymously against this work, the phrase "stabs in the dark" would have been intelligible. As he had written in his own name, and had not mentioned his brother's work at all, part at least of the accusation was transparently and obviously false.

At last, however, Freeman had gone too far. Froude had borne a great deal, he could bear no more; and he took up a weapon which Freeman never forgot. I can well recall, as can hundreds of others, the appearance in The Nineteenth Century for April, 1879, of "A Few Words on Mr. Freeman." They were read with a sense of general pleasure and satisfaction, a boyish delight in seeing a big bully well thrashed before the whole school. Froude was so calm, so dignified, so self- restrained, so consciously superior to his rough antagonist in temper and behaviour. Only once did he show any emotion. It was when he spoke of the dastardly attempt to strike him through the memory of his brother. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any person-not one-in whom, as I now think of him, the excellences of intellect and character were combined in fuller measure. Of my personal feeling towards him I cannot speak. I am ashamed to have been compelled, by what I can only describe as an inexcusable insult, to say what I have said." It was not difficult to show that Freeman's four articles in The Contemporary Review contained worse blunders than any he had attributed to Froude, as, for instance, the allegation that Henry VIII., who founded bishoprics and organised the defence of the country, squandered away all that men before his time had agreed to respect. Easy also was it to disprove the charge of "hatred towards the English Church at all times and under all characters" by the mere mention of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and Hooper. The statement that Froude had been a "fanatical votary" of the mediaeval Church was almost delicious in the extravagance of its absurdity; and it would have been impossible better to retort the wild charges of misrepresentation, in which it is hard to suppose that even Freeman himself believed, than by the simple words, "It is true that I subst.i.tute a story in English for a story in Latin, a short story for a long one, and a story in a popular form for a story in a scholastic one." In short, Froude wrote a style which every scholar loves, and every pedant hates. With a light touch, but a touch which had a sting, Froude disposed of the nonsense which made him translate praedictae rationes "shortened rations" instead of "the foregoing accounts," and in a graver tone he reminded the public that his offer to test the accuracy of his extracts from unprinted authorities had been refused. Graver still, and not without indignation, is his reference to Freeman's suggestion that he thought the Cathedral Church of St. Albans had been destroyed. Most people, when they finished Froude's temperate but crus.h.i.+ng refutation, must have felt the opportunity for it should ever surprised that have arisen.

Froude had done his work at last, and done it thoroughly. Freeman's plight was not to be envied. If his offence had been rank, his punishment had been tremendous. Even The Spectator, which had hitherto upheld him through thick and thin, admonished him that he had pa.s.sed the bounds of decency and infringed the rules of behaviour. Dreading a repet.i.tion of the penalty if he repeated the offence, fearing that silence would imply acquiescence in charges of persistent calumny, he blurted out a kind of awkward half-apology. He confessed, in The Contemporary Review for May, 1879, that he had criticised in The Sat.u.r.day all the volumes of Froude's Elizabeth. This self-const.i.tuted champion proceeded to say that he knew nothing about Froude's personal character, and that when he accused Froude of stabbing his dead brother "in the dark" he only meant that the brother was dead. When he says that Froude's article was "plausible, and more than plausible," he is quite right. It is more than plausible, because it is true. After vainly trying to explain away some of the errors brought home to him by Froude, and leaving others unnoticed, he complains, with deep and obvious sincerity, that Froude had not read his books, nor even his articles in Encyclopaedias. He exhibits a striking instance of his own accuracy. In his defence against the rather absurd charge of not going, as Macaulay had gone, to see the places about which he wrote, Froude pleaded want of means. Freeman rejoined that Macaulay was at one time of his life "positively poor." He was so for a very short time when his Fellows.h.i.+p at Trinity came to an end. Unluckily for Freeman's statement the period was before his appointment to be Legal Member of Council in India, and long before he had begun to write his History of England. The most charitable explanation of an erroneous statement is usually the correct one, and it was probably forgetfulness which made Freeman say that he did not hear of Froude's having placed copies of the Simancas ma.n.u.scripts in the British Museum till 1878, whereas he had himself discussed it in The Pall Mall Gazette eight years before. If Froude had made such an astonis.h.i.+ng slip, there would have been more ground for imputing to him an incapacity to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Freeman's "Last Words on Mr. Froude" show no sign of penitence or good feeling, and they end with characteristic bl.u.s.ter about the truth, from which he had so grievously departed. But Froude was never troubled with him again.

Although a refuted detractor is not formidable in the flesh, the evil that he does lives after him. Freeman's view of Froude is not now held by any one whose opinion counts; yet still there seems to rise, as from a brazen head of Ananias, dismal and monotonous chaunt, "He was careless of the truth, he did not make history the business of his life." He did make history the business of his life, and he cared more for truth than for anything else in the world. Freeman's biographer has given no clue to his imperfect sympathy with Froude. Green, true historian as he was, made more mistakes than Froude, and the mistakes he did make were more serious. He trespa.s.sed on the preserves of Brewer, who criticised him severely without deviating from the standard of a Christian and a gentleman. Even over the domain of Stubbs, and the consecrated ground of the Norman Conquest itself, Green ranged without being Freemanised as a poacher. But then Green was Freeman's personal friend, and in friends.h.i.+p Freeman was staunch. They belonged to the same set, and no one was more cliquish than Freeman. Liberal as he was in politics, he always professed the utmost contempt for the general public, and wondered what guided their strange tastes in literature. Dean Stephens has apparently suppressed most of the references to Froude in Freeman's private letters, and certainly he drops no hint of the controversy about Becket. But the following pa.s.sage from his "Concluding Survey" is apparently aimed at Froude. Freeman, we are told, "was unable to write or speak politely"-and if the Dean had stopped there I should have had nothing to say; but he goes on-"of any one who pretended to more knowledge than he really had, or who enjoyed a reputation for learning which was undeserved; nay, more, he considered it to be a positive duty to expose such persons. In doing this he was often no doubt too indifferent to their feelings, and employed language of unwarranted severity which provoked angry retaliation, and really weakened the effect of his criticism, by diverting public sympathy from himself to the object of his attack. But it was quite a mistake to suppose, as many did, that his fierce utterances were the outcome of ill-temper or of personal animosity. He entertained no ill-will whatever towards literary or political opponents."

There is more to the same effect, and of course Froude must have been in Stephens's mind. But the reputation of a great historian is not to be taken away by hints. It may suit Freeman's admirers to seek refuge in meaningless generalities. Those who are grateful for Froude's services to England, and to literature, have no interest in concealment. Froude never "pretended to more knowledge than he really had." So far from "enjoying a reputation for learning which was undeserved," he disguised his learning rather than displayed it, and wore it lightly, a flower. That Freeman should have "considered it to be a positive duty to expose" a man whose knowledge was so much wider and whose industry was so much greater than his own is strange. That he did his best for years, no doubt from the highest motives, to damage Froude's reputation, and to injure his good name, is certain. With the general reader he failed. The public had too much sense to believe Froude was merely, or chiefly, or at all, an ecclesiastical pamphleteer. But by dint of noisy a.s.sertion, and perpetual repet.i.tion, Freeman did at last infect academic coteries with the idea that Froude was a superficial sciolist. The same thing had been said of Macaulay, and believed by the same sort of people. Froude's books were certainly much easier to read than Freeman's. Must they therefore have been much easier to write? Two-thirds of Froude's mistakes would have been avoided, and Freeman would never have had his chance, if the former had had a keener eye for slips in his proof-sheets, or had engaged competent a.s.sistance. When he allowed Wilhelmus to be printed instead of Willelmus, Freeman shouted with exultant glee that a man so hop