Froude's History of England ..............................................................................................................................1

Charles Kingsley ......................................................................................................................................1

There appeared a few years since a 'Comic History of England,' duly caricaturing and falsifying all our great

national events, and representing the English people, for many centuries back, as a mob of fools and knaves,

led by the nose in each generation by a few arch fools and archknaves. Some thoughtful persons regarded

the book with utter contempt and indignation; it seemed to them a crime to have written it; a proof of

'banausia,' as Aristotle would have called it, only to be outdone by the writing a 'Comic Bible.' After a while,

however, their indignation began to subside; their second thoughts, as usual, were more charitable than their

first; they were not surprised to hear that the author was an honest, just, and able magistrate; they saw that the

publication of such a book involved no moral turpitude; that it was merely meant as a jest on a subject on

which jesting was permissible, and as a money speculation in a field of which men had a right to make

money; while all which seemed offensive in it was merely the outcome, and as it were apotheosis, of that

method of writing English history which has been popular for nearly a hundred years. 'Which of our modern

historians,' they asked themselves, 'has had any real feeling of the importance, the sacredness, of his

subject?any real trust in, or respect for, the characters with whom he dealt? Has not the belief of each and

all of them been the samethat on the whole, the many always have been fools and knaves; foolish and

knavish enough, at least, to become the puppets of a few fools and knaves who held the reins of power? Have

they not held that, on the whole, the problems of human nature and human history have been sufficiently

solved by Gibbon and Voltaire, Gil Blas and Figaro; that our forefathers were silly barbarians; that this

glorious nineteenth century is the one region of light, and that all before was outer darkness, peopled by

'foreign devils,' Englishmen, no doubt, according to the flesh, but in spirit, in knowledge, in creed, in

customs, so utterly different from ourselves that we shall merely show our sentimentalism by doing aught but

On what other principle have our English histories as yet been constructed, even down to the children's

books, which taught us in childhood that the history of this country was nothing but a string of foolish wars,

carried on by wicked kings, for reasons hitherto unexplained, save on that great historic law of Goldsmith's

It will be answered by some, and perhaps rather angrily, that these strictures are too sweeping; that there is

arising, in a certain quarter, a school of history books for young people of a far more reverent tone, which

tries to do full honour to the Church and her work in the world. Those books of this school which we have

seen, we must reply, seem just as much wanting in real reverence for the past as the school of Gibbon and

Voltaire. It is not the past which they reverence, but a few characters or facts eclectically picked out of the

past, and, for the most part, made to look beautiful by ignoring all the features which will not suit their

preconceived pseudoideal. There is in these books a scarcely concealed dissatisfaction with the whole

course of the British mind since the Reformation, and (though they are not inclined to confess the fact) with

its whole course before the Reformation, because that course was one of steady struggle against the Papacy

and its antinational pretensions. They are the outcome of an utterly unEnglish tone of thought; and the so

called 'ages of faith' are pleasant and useful to them, principally because they are distant and unknown

enough to enable them to conceal from their readers that in the ages on which they look back as ideally

perfect a Bernard and a Francis of Assisi were crying all day long'O that my head were a fountain of tears,

that I might weep for the sins of my people!' Dante was cursing popes and prelates in the name of the God of

Righteousness; Boccaccio and Chaucer were lifting the veil from priestly abominations of which we now are

ashamed even to read; and Wolsey, seeing the rottenness of the whole system, spent his mighty talents, and at

last poured out his soul unto death, in one long useless effort to make the crooked straight, and number that

which had been weighed in the balances of God, and found for ever wanting. To ignore wilfully facts like

these, which were patent all along to the British nation, facts on which the British laity acted, till they finally

conquered at the Reformation, and on which they are acting still, and will, probably, act for ever, is not to

have any real reverence for the opinions or virtues of our forefathers; and we are not astonished to find

repeated, in such books, the old stock calumnies against our lay and Protestant worthies, taken at second

hand from the pages of Lingard. In copying from Lingard, however, this party has done no more than those

writers have who would repudiate any partyalmost any Christianpurpose. Lingard is known to have

been a learned man, and to have examined many manuscripts which few else had taken the trouble to look at;

so his word is to be taken, no one thinking it worth while to ask whether he has either honestly read or

honestly quoted the documents. It suited the sentimental and lazy liberality of the last generation to make a

show of fairness by letting the Popish historian tell his side of the story, and to sneer at the illiberal old notion

that gentlemen of his class were given to be rather careless about historic truth when they had a purpose to

serve thereby; and Lingard is now actually recommended as a standard authority for the young by educated

Protestants, who seem utterly unable to see that, whether the man be honest or not, his whole view of the

course of British events since Becket first quarrelled with his king must be antipodal to their own; and that

his account of all which has passed for three hundred years since the fall of Wolsey is most likely to be (and,

indeed, may be proved to be) one huge libel on the whole nation, and the destiny which God has marked out

There is, indeed, no intrinsic cause why the ecclesiastical, or pseudoCatholic, view of history should, in any

wise, conduce to a just appreciation of our forefathers. For not only did our forefathers rebel against that

conception again and again, till they finally trampled it under their feet, and so appear, prima facie, as

offenders to be judged at its bar; but the conception itself is one which takes the very same view of nature as

that cynic conception of which we spoke above. Man, with the Romish divines, is, ipso facto, the same being

as the man of Voltaire, Le Sage, or Beaumarchais; he is an insane and degraded being, who is to be kept in

order, and, as far as may be, cured and set to work by an ecclesiastical system; and the only threads of light in

the dark web of his history are clerical and theurgic, not lay and human. Voltaire is the very experimentum

crucis of this ugly fact. European history looks to him what it would have looked to his Jesuit preceptors, had

the sacerdotal element in it been wanting; what heathen history actually did look to them. He eliminates the

sacerdotal element, and nothing remains but the chaos of apes and wolves which the Jesuits had taught him to

believe was the original substratum of society. The humanity of his historyeven of his 'Pucelle

d'Orleans,is simply the humanity of Sanchez and the rest of those vingtquatre Peres who hang gibbeted for

ever in the pages of Pascal. He is superior to his teachers, certainly, in this, that he has hope for humanity on

earth; dreams of a new and nobler life for society, by means of a true and scientific knowledge of the laws of

the moral and material universe; in a word, he has, in the midst of all his filth and his atheism, a faith in a

righteous and truthrevealing God, which the priests who brought him up had not. Let the truth be spoken,

even though in favour of such a destroying Azrael as Voltaire. And what if his primary conception of

humanity be utterly base? Is that of our modern historians so much higher? Do Christian men seem to them,

on the whole, in all ages, to have had the spirit of God with them, leading them into truth, however

Have they ever heard with their ears, or listened when their fathers have declared unto them, the noble works

which God did in their days, and in the old time before them? Do they believe that the path of Christendom

has been, on the whole, the path of life and the right way, and that the living God is leading her therein? Are

they proud of the old British worthies? Are they jealous and tender of the reputation of their ancestors? Do

they believe that there were any worthies at all in England before the steamengine and political economy

were discovered? Do their conceptions of past society and the past generations retain anything of that great

thought which is common to all the Aryan racesthat is, to all races who have left aught behind them better

than mere mounds of earthto Hindoo and Persian, Greek and Roman, Teuton and Scandinavian, that men

are the sons of the heroes, who were the sons of God? Or do they believe that for civilised people of the

nineteenth century it is as well to say as little as possible about ancestors who possessed our vices without our

amenities, our ignorance without our science; who were bred, no matter how, like flies by summer heat, out

of that everlasting midden which men call the world, to buzz and sting their foolish day, and leave behind

them a fresh race which knows them not, and could win no honour by owning them, and which owes them no

more than if it had been produced, as middenflies were said to be of old, by some spontaneous generation?

It is not probable that this writer will be likely to undervalue political economy, or the steamengine, or any

other solid and practical good which God has unveiled to this generation. All that he does demand (for he has

a right to demand it) is that rational men should believe that our forefathers were at least as good as we are;

that whatsoever their measure of light was, they acted up to what they knew as faithfully as we do; and that,

on the whole, it was not their fault if they did not know more. Even now the real discoveries of the age are

made, as of old, by a very few men; and, when made, have to struggle, as of old, against all manner of

superstitions, lazinesses, scepticisms. Is the history of the Minie rifle one so very complimentary to our age's

quickness of perception that we can afford to throw many stones at the prejudices of our ancestors? The truth

is that, as of old, 'many men talk of Robin Hood who never shot in his bow'; and many talk of Bacon who

never discovered a law by induction since they were born. As far as our experience goes, those who are

loudest in their jubilations over the wonderful progress of the age are those who have never helped that

progress forward one inch, but find it a great deal easier and more profitable to use the results which humbler

men have painfully worked out as secondhand capital for hustingsspeeches and railway books, and flatter a

mechanics' institute of selfsatisfied youths by telling them that the least instructed of them is wiser than

Erigena or Roger Bacon. Let them be. They have their reward. And so also has the patient and humble man of

science, who, the more he knows, confesses the more how little he knows, and looks back with affectionate

reverence on the great men of old timeon Archimedes and Ptolemy, Aristotle and Pliny, and many another

honourable man who, walking in great darkness, sought a ray of light, and did not seek in vain,as integral

parts of that golden chain of which he is but one link more; as scientific forefathers, without whose aid his

Meanwhile, this general tone of irreverence for our forefathers is no hopeful sign. It is unwise to 'inquire why

the former times were better than these'; to hang lazily and weakly over some eclectic dream of a past golden

age; for to do so is to deny that God is working in this age, as well as in past ages; that His light is as near us

But it is more than unwise to boast and rejoice that the former times were worse than these; and to teach

young people to say in their hearts, 'What clever fellows we are, compared with our stupid old fogies of

fathers!' More than unwise; for possibly it may be false in fact. To look at the political and moral state of

Europe at this moment, Christendom can hardly afford to look down on any preceding century, and seems to

be in want of something which neither science nor constitutional government seems able to supply. Whether

our forefathers also lacked that something we will not inquire just now; but if they did, their want of scientific

and political knowledge was evidently not the cause of the defect; or why is not Spain now infinitely better,

At home, tooBut on the question whether we are so very much better off than our forefathers Mr. Froude,

not we, must speak: for he has deliberately, in his new history, set himself to the solution of this question, and

we will not anticipate what he has to say; what we would rather insist on now are the moral effects produced

on our young people by books which teach them to look with contempt on all generations but their own, and

with suspicion on all public characters save a few contemporaries of their own especial party.

There is an ancient Hebrew book, which contains a singular story concerning a grandson who was cursed

because his father laughed at the frailty of the grandfather. Whether the reader shall regard that story (as we

do) as a literal fact recorded by inspired wisdom, as an instance of one of the great rootlaws of family life,

and therefore of that national life which (as the Hebrew book so cunningly shows) is the organic development

of the family life; or whether he shall treat it (as we do not) as a mere apologue or myth, he must confess that

it is equally grand in its simplicity and singular in its unexpected result. The words of the story, taken literally

and simply, no more justify the notion that Canaan's slavery was any magical consequence of the old

patriarch's anger than they do the wellknown theory that it was the cause of the Negro's blackness. Ham

shows a low, foul, irreverent, unnatural temper towards his father. The old man's shame is not a cause of

shame to his son, but only of laughter. Noah prophesies (in the fullest and deepest meaning of that word) that

a curse will come upon that son's son; that he will be a slave of slaves; and reason and experience show that

he spoke truth. Let the young but see that their fathers have no reverence for the generation before them, then

will they in turn have no reverence for their fathers. Let them be taught that the sins of their ancestors involve

their own honour so little that they need not take any trouble to clear the blot off the scutcheon, but may

safely sit down and laugh over it, saying, 'Very likely it is true. If so, it is very amusing; and if notwhat

matter?'Then those young people are being bred up in a habit of mind which contains in itself all the

capabilities of degradation and slavery, in selfconceit, hasty assertion, disbelief in nobleness, and all the

other 'credulities of scepticism': parted from that past from which they take their common origin, they are

parted also from each other, and become selfish, selfseeking, divided, and therefore weak: disbelieving in

the nobleness of those who have gone before them, they learn more and more to disbelieve in the nobleness

of those around them; and, by denying God's works of old, come, by a just and dreadful Nemesis, to be

unable to see his works in the men of their own day; to suspect and impugn valour, righteousness,

disinterestedness in their contemporaries; to attribute low motives; to pride themselves on looking at men and

things as 'men who know the world,' so the young puppies style it; to be less and less chivalrous to women,

less and less respectful to old men, less and less ashamed of boasting about their sensual appetites; in a word,

to show all those symptoms which, when fully developed, leave a generation without fixed principles,

without strong faith, without self restraint, without moral cohesion, the sensual and divided prey of any race,

however inferior in scientific knowledge, which has a clear and fixed notion of its work and destiny. That

many of these signs are themselves more and more ominously showing in our young men, from the fine

gentleman who rides in Rotten Row to the boymechanic who listens enraptured to Mr. Holyoake's

exposures of the absurdity of all human things save Mr. Holyoake's self, is a fact which presses itself most on

those who have watched this age most carefully, and who (rightly or wrongly) attribute much of this

miserable temper to the way in which history has been written among us for the last hundred years.

Whether or not Mr. Froude would agree with these notions, he is more or less responsible for them; for they

have been suggested by his 'History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth.' It was

impossible to read the book without feeling the contrast between its tone and that of every other account of

the times which one had ever seen. Mr. Froude seems to have set to work upon the principle, too much

ignored in judging of the past, that the historian's success must depend on his dramatic faculty; and not

merely on that constructive element of the faculty in which Mr. Macaulay shows such astonishing power, but

on that higher and deeper critical element which ought to precede the constructive process, and without which

the constructive element will merely enable a writer, as was once bitterly but truly said, 'to produce the

greatest possible misrepresentation with the least possible distortion of fact.' That deeper dramatic faculty, the

critical, is not logical merely, but moral, and depends on the moral health, the wideness and heartiness of his

moral sympathies, by which he can put himselfas Mr. Froude has attempted to do, and as we think

successfullyinto the place of each and every character, and not merely feel for them, but feel with them.

He does not merely describe their actions from the outside, attributing them arbitrarily to motives which are

pretty sure to be the lowest possible, because it is easier to conceive a low motive than a lofty one, and to call

a man a villain than to unravel patiently the tangled web of good and evil of which his thoughts are

composed. He has attempted to conceive of his characters as he would if they had been his own

contemporaries and equals, acting, speaking in his company; and he has therefore thought himself bound to

act toward them by those rules of charity and courtesy, common alike to Christian morals, English law, and

decent society; namely, to hold every man innocent till he is proved guilty; where a doubt exists, to give the

prisoner at the bar the benefit of it; not to excite the minds of the public against him by those insinuative or

vituperative epithets, which are but adders and scorpions; and, on the whole, to believe that a man's death and

burial is not the least reason for ceasing to behave to him like a gentleman and a Christian. We are not

inclined to play with solemn things, or to copy Lucian and Quevedo in writing dialogues of the dead; but

what dialogues might some bold pen dash off between the old sons of Anak, at whose coming Hades has long

ago been moved, and to receive whom all the kings of the nation have risen up, and the little scribblers who

have fancied themselves able to fathom and describe characters to whom they were but pigmies! Conceive a

half hour's interview between Queen Elizabeth and some popular lady scribbler, who has been deluding

herself into the fancy that gossiping inventories of millinery are history . . . 'You pretend to judge me, whose

labours, whose cares, whose fiery trials were, beside yours, as the heaving volcano beside a boy's firework?

You condemn my weaknesses? Know that they were stronger than your strength! You impute motives for my

sins? Know that till you are as great as I have been, for evil and for good, you will be as little able to

comprehend my sins as my righteousness! Poor marshcroaker, who wishest not merely to swell up to the

bulk of the ox, but to embrace it in thy little paws, know thine own size, and leave me to be judged by Him

who made me!' . . . How the poor soul would shrink back into nothing before that lion eye which saw and

guided the destinies of the world, and all the flunkeynature (if such a vice exist beyond the grave) come out

in utter abjectness, as if the ass in the fable, on making his kick at the dead lion, had discovered to his horror

that the lion was alive and wellSpirit of Quevedo! finish for us the picture which we cannot finish for

In a very different spirit from such has Mr. Froude approached these times. Great and good deeds were done

in them; and it has therefore seemed probable to him that there were great and good men there to do them.

Thoroughly awake to the fact that the Reformation was the new birth of the British nation, it has seemed to

him a puzzling theory which attributes its success to the lust of a tyrant and the cupidity of his courtiers. It

has evidently seemed to him paradoxical that a king who was reputed to have been a satyr, instead of keeping

as many concubines as seemed good to him, should have chosen to gratify his passions by entering six times

into the strict bonds of matrimony, religiously observing those bonds. It has seemed to him even more

paradoxical that one reputed to have been the most sanguinary tyrant who ever disgraced the English throne

should have been not only endured, but loved and regretted by a fierce and freespoken people; and he, we

suppose, could comprehend as little as we can the reasoning of such a passage as the following, especially

'A government administered with so frequent violations, not only of the chartered privileges of Englishmen,

but of those still more sacred rights which natural law has established, must have been regarded, one would

imagine, with just abhorrence and earnest longings for a change. Yet contemporary authorities by no means

answer this expectation. Some mention Henry after his death in language of eulogy;' (not only Elizabeth, be it

remembered, but Cromwell also, always spoke of him with deepest respect; and their language always found

an echo in the English heart;) 'and if we except those whom attachment to the ancient religion had inspired

with hatred to his memory, few seem to have been aware that his name would descend to posterity among

those of the many tyrants and oppressors of innocence whom the wrath of Heaven has raised up, and the

The names of even those few we should be glad to have; for it seems to us that, with the exception of a few

ultraProtestants, who could not forgive that persecution of the Reformers which he certainly permitted, if

not encouraged, during one period of his reign, no one adopted the modern view of his character till more

than a hundred years after his death, when belief in all nobleness and faith had died out among an ignoble and

faithless generation, and the scandalous gossip of such a light rogue as Osborne was taken into the place of

To clear up such seeming paradoxes as these by carefully examining the facts of the sixteenth century has

been Mr. Froude's work; and we have the results of his labour in two volumes, embracing only a period of

eleven years; but giving promise that the mysteries of the succeeding time will be well cleared up for us in

future volumes, and that we shall find our forefathers to have been, if no better, at least no worse men than

ourselves. He has brought to the task known talents and learning, a mastery over English prose almost

unequalled in this generation, a spirit of most patient and goodtempered research, and that intimate

knowledge of human motives and passions which his former books have shown, and which we have a right to

expect from any scholar who has really profited by Aristotle's unrivalled Ethics. He has fairly examined

every contemporary document within his reach, and, as he informs us in the preface, he has been enabled,

through the kindness of Sir Francis Palgrave, to consult a great number of MSS. relating to the Reformation,

hitherto all but unknown to the public, and referred to in his work as MSS. in the Rolls' House, where the

originals are easily accessible. These, he states, he intends to publish, with additions from his own reading, as

But Mr. Froude's chief textbook seems to have been State Papers and Acts of Parliament. He has begun his

work in the only temper in which a man can write accurately and well; in a temper of trust toward the

generation whom he describes. The only temper; for if a man has no affection for the characters of whom he

reads, he will never understand them; if he has no respect for his subject, he will never take the trouble to

exhaust it. To such an author the Statutes at large, as the deliberate expression of the nation's will and

conscience, will appear the most important of all sources of information; the first to be consulted, the last to

be contradicted; the Canon which is not to be checked and corrected by private letters and flying pamphlets,

but which is to check and correct them. This seems Mr. Froude's theory; and we are at no pains to confess

that if he be wrong we see no hope of arriving at truth. If these public documents are not to be admitted in

evidence before all others, we see no hope for the faithful and earnest historian; he must give himself up to

swim as he may on the frothy stream of private letters, anecdotes, and pamphlets, the puppet of the ignorance,

Beginning his history with the fall of Wolsey, Mr. Froude enters, of course, at his first step into the vexed

question of Henry's divorce: an introductory chapter, on the general state of England, we shall notice

A very short inspection of the method in which he handles the divorce question gives us at once confidence in

his temper and judgment, and hope that we may at last come to some clearer understanding of it than the old

law gives us, which we have already quoted, concerning the dog who went mad to serve his private ends. In a

few masterly pages he sketches for us the rotting and dying Church, which had recovered her power after the

Wars of the Roses over an exhausted nation; but in form only, not in life. Wolsey, with whom he has fair and

understanding sympathy, he sketches as the transition minister, 'loving England well, but loving Rome better,'

who intends a reform of the Church, but who, as the Pope's commissioner for that very purpose, is liable to a

praemunire, and therefore dare not appeal to Parliament to carry out his designs, even if he could have

counted on the Parliament's assistance in any measures designed to invigorate the Church. At last arises in the

divorce question the accident which brings to an issue on its most vital point the question of Papal power in

This appears to have begun in the winter of 152627. It was proposed to marry the Princess Mary to a son of

the French king. The Bishop of Tarbes, who conducted the negotiations, advised himself, apparently by

special instigation of the evil spirit, to raise a question as to her legitimacy.

No more ingenious plan for convulsing England could have been devised. The marriage from which Mary

sprang only stood on a reluctant and doubtful dispensation of the Pope's. Henry had entered into it at the

entreaty of his ministers, contrary to a solemn promise given to his father, and in spite of the remonstrances

of the Archbishop of Canterbury. No blessing seemed to have rested on it. All his children had died young,

save this one sickly girl: a sure note of divine displeasure in the eyes of that coarseminded Church which

has always declared the chief, if not the only, purpose of marriage to be the procreation of children.

But more: to question Mary's legitimacy was to throw open the question of succession to half a dozen

ambitious competitors. It was, too probably, to involve England at Henry's death in another civil war of the

Roses, and in all the internecine horrors which were still rankling in the memories of men; and probably, also,

to bring down a French or Scotch invasion. There was then too good reason, as Mr. Froude shows at length,

for Wolsey's assertion to John Cassalis 'If his Holiness, which God forbid, shall show himself unwilling to

listen to the King's demands, to me assuredly it will be but grief to live longer, for the innumerable evils

which I foresee will follow . . . Nothing before us but universal and inevitable ruin.' Too good reason there

was for the confession of the Pope himself to Gardner, 'What danger it was to the realm to have this thing

hang in suspense . . . That without an heirmale, etc., the realm was like to come to dissolution.' Too good

reason for the bold assertion of the CardinalGovernor of Bologna, that 'he knew the guise of England as few

men did, and that if the King should die without heirsmale, he was sure that it would cost two hundred

thousand men's lives; and that to avoid this mischief by a second marriage, he thought, would deserve

heaven.' Too good reason for the assertion of Hall, that 'all indifferent and discreet persons judged it

necessary for the Pope to grant Henry a divorce, and, by enabling him to marry again, give him the hope of

an undisputed heirmale.' The Pope had full power to do this; in fact, such cases had been for centuries

integral parts of his jurisdiction as head of Christendom. But he was at once too timid and too timeserving to

exercise his acknowledged authority; and thus, just at the very moment when his spiritual power was being

tried in the balance, he chose himself to expose his political power to the same test. Both were equally found

wanting. He had, it appeared, as little heart to do justice among kings and princes as he had to seek and to

Through the tangled brakes of this divorce question Mr. Froude leads us with ease and grace, throwing light,

and even beauty, into dark nooks where before all was mist, not merely by his intimate acquaintance with the

facts, but still more by his deep knowledge of human character, and of woman's even more than of man's. For

the first time the actors in this long tragedy appear to us as no mere bodiless and soulless names, but as

beings of like passions with ourselves, comprehensible, coherent, organic, even in their inconsistencies.

Catherine of Arragon is still the Catherine of Shakspeare; but Mr. Froude has given us the key to many parts

of her story which Shakspeare left unexplained, and delicately enough has made us understand how Henry's

affections, if he ever had any for herfaithfully as he had kept (with one exception) to that loveless mariage

de convenancemay have been gradually replaced by indifference and even dislike, long before the divorce

was forced on him as a question not only of duty to the nation, but of duty to Heaven. And that he did see it

in this latter light, Mr. Froude brings proof from his own words, from which we can escape only by believing

that the confessedly honest 'Bluff King Hal' had suddenly become a consummate liar and a canting hypocrite.

Delicately, too, as if speaking of a lady whom he had met in modern society (as a gentleman is bound to do),

does Mr. Froude touch on the sins of that hapless woman, who played for Henry's crown, and paid for it with

her life. With all mercy and courtesy he gives us proof (for he thinks it his duty to do so) of the French

miseducation, the petty cunning, the tendency to sensuality, the wilful indelicacy of her position in Henry's

household as the rival of his queen, which made her last catastrophe at least possible. Of the justice of her

sentence he has no doubt, any more than of her preengagement to some one, as proved by a letter existing

among Cromwell's papers. Poor thing! If she did that which was laid to her charge, and more, she did

nothing, after all, but what she had been in the habit of seeing the queens and princesses of the French court

do notoriously, and laugh over shamelessly; while, as Mr. Froude well says, 'If we are to hold her entirely

free from guilt, we place not only the King, but the Privy Council, the Judges, the Lords and Commons, and

the two Houses of Convocation, in a position fatal to their honour and degrading to ordinary humanity' (Mr.

Froude should have added Anne Boleyn's own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and her father, who were on the

commission appointed to try her lovers, and her cousin, Anthony St. Leger, a man of the very highest

character and ability, who was on the jury which found a true bill against her). 'We can not,' continues Mr.

Froude, 'acquiesce without inquiry in so painful a conclusion. The English nation also, as well as she,

deserves justice at our hands; and it cannot be thought uncharitable if we look with some scrutiny at the

career of a person who, but for the catastrophe with which it closed, would not have so readily obtained

forgiveness for having admitted the addresses of the King, or for having received the homage of the court as

its future sovereign, while the King's wife, her mistress, as yet resided under the same roof.' Mr. Froude's

conclusion is, after examining the facts, the same with the whole nation of England in Henry's reign: but no

one can accuse him of want of sympathy with the unhappy woman, who reads the eloquent and affecting

account of her trial and death, which ends his second volume. Our only fear is, that by having thus told the

truth he has, instead of justifying our ancestors, only added one more to the list of people who are to be 'given

up' with a cynical shrug and smile. We have heard already, and among young ladies too, who can be as

cynical as other people in these times, such speeches as, 'Well, I suppose he has proved Anne Boleyn to be a

bad creature; but that does not make that horrid Henry any more right in cutting off her head.' Thus two

people will be despised where only one was before, and the fact still ignored, that it is just as senseless to say

that Henry cut off Anne Boleyn's head as that Queen Victoria hanged Palmer. Death, and death of a far more

horrible kind than that which Anne Boleyn suffered, was the established penalty of the offences of which she

was convicted: and which had in her case this fearful aggravation, that they were offences not against Henry

merely, but against the whole English nation. She had been married in order that there might be an

undisputed heir to the throne, and a fearful war avoided. To throw into dispute, by any conduct of hers, the

legitimacy of her own offspring, argued a levity or a hard heartedness which of itself deserved the severest

We will pass from this disagreeable topic to Mr. Froude's lifelike sketch of Pope Clement, and the endless

tracasseries into which his mingled weakness and cunning led him, and which, like most crooked dealings,

ended by defeating their own object. Pages 125 et sqq. of Vol. I. contain sketches of him, his thoughts and

ways, as amusing as they are historically important; but we have no space to quote from them. It will be well

for those to whom the Reformation is still a matter of astonishment to read those pages, and consider what

manner of man he was, in spite of all pretended divine authority, under whose rule the Romish system

But of all these figures, not excepting Henry's own, Wolsey stands out as the most grand and tragical; and

Mr. Froude has done good service to history, if only in making us understand at last the wondrous 'butcher's

son.' Shakspeare seems to have felt (though he could explain the reason neither to his auditors nor, perhaps,

to himself) that Wolsey was, on the whole, an heroical man. Mr. Froude shows at once his strength and his

weakness; his deep sense of the rottenness of the Church; his purpose to purge her from those abominations

which were as well known, it seems, to him as they were afterwards to the whole people of England; his vast

schemes for education; his still vaster schemes for breaking the alliance with Spain, and uniting France and

England as fellowservants of the Pope, and twinpillars of the sacred fabric of the Church, which helped so

much toward his interest in Catherine's divorce, as a 'means' (these are his own words) 'to bind my most

excellent sovereign and this glorious realm to the holy Roman See in faith and obedience for ever'; his hopes

of deposing the Emperor, putting down the German heresies, and driving back the Turks beyond the pale of

Christendom; his pathetic confession to the Bishop of Bayonne that 'if he could only see the divorce arranged,

the King remarried, the succession settled, and the laws and the Church reformed, he would retire from the

Peace be with him! He was surely a noble soul; misled, it may beas who is not when his turn comes?by

the pride of conscious power; and 'though he loved England well, yet loving Rome better': but still it is a

comfort to see, either in past or in present, one more brother whom we need not despise, even though he may

And on a dream he did waste them, in spite of all his cunning. As Mr. Froude, in a noble passage, says:

It will be seen from this magnificent passage that Mr. Froude is distinctly a Protestant. He is one, to judge

from his book; and all the better one, because he can sympathise with whatsoever nobleness, even with

whatsoever mere conservatism, existed in the Catholic party. And therefore, because he has sympathies

which are not merely party ones, but human ones, he has given the world, in these two volumes, a history of

the early Reformation altogether unequalled. This human sympathy, while it has enabled him to embalm in

most affecting prose the sad story of the noble though mistaken Carthusians, and to make even the Nun of

Kent interesting, because truly womanly, in her very folly and deceit, has enabled him likewise to show us

the hearts of the early martyrs as they never have been shown before. His sketch of the Christian Brothers,

and his little true romance of Anthony Dalaber, the Oxford student, are gems of writing; while his conception

of Latimer, on whom he looks as the hero of the movement, and all but an English Luther, is as worthy of

Latimer as it is of himself. It is written as history should be, discriminatingly, patiently, and yet lovingly and

genially; rejoicing not in evil, but in the truth; and rejoicing still more in goodness, where goodness can

To the ecclesiastical and political elements in the English Reformation Mr. Froude devotes a large portion of

his book. We shall not enter into the questions which he discusses therein. That aspect of the movement is a

foreign and a delicate subject, from discussing which a Scotch periodical may be excused. {2} North Britain

had a somewhat different problem to solve from her southern sister, and solved it in an altogether different

way: but this we must say, that the facts and, still more, the State Papers (especially the petition of the

Commons, as contrasted with the utterly benighted answer of the Bishops) which Mr. Froude gives are such

as to raise our opinion of the method on which the English part of the Reformation was conducted, and make

us believe that in this, as in other matters, both Henry and his Parliament, though still doctrinal Romanists,

This result is of the same kind as most of those at which Mr. Froude arrives. They form altogether a general

justification of our ancestors in Henry the Eighth's time, if not of Henry the Eighth himself, which frees Mr.

Froude from that charge of irreverence to the past generations against which we protested in the beginning of

the article. We hope honestly that he may be as successful in his next volumes as he has been in these, in

vindicating the worthies of the sixteenth century. Whether he shall fail or not, and whether or not he has

altogether succeeded, in the volumes before us, his book marks a new epoch, and, we trust, a healthier and

loftier one, in English history. We trust that they inaugurate a time in which the deeds of our forefathers shall

be looked on as sacred heirlooms; their sins as our shame, their victories as bequests to us; when men shall

have sufficient confidence in those to whom they owe their existence to scrutinise faithfully and patiently

every fact concerning them, with a proud trust that, search as they may, they will not find much of which to

Lastly, Mr. Froude takes a view of Henry's character, not, indeed, new (for it is the original one), but obsolete

for now two hundred years. Let it be well understood that he makes no attempt (he has been accused thereof)

to whitewash Henry: all that he does is to remove as far as he can the modern layers of 'blackwash,' and to

let the man himself, fair or foul, be seen. For the result he is not responsible: it depends on facts; and unless

Mr. Froude has knowingly concealed facts to an amount of which even a Lingard might be ashamed, the

result is that Henry the Eighth was actually very much the man which he appeared to be to the English nation

in his own generation, and for two or three generations after his deatha result which need not astonish us,

if we will only give our ancestors credit for having at least as much common sense as ourselves, and believe

(why should we not?) that, on the whole, they understood their own business better than we are likely to do.

'The bloated tyrant,' it is confessed, contrived somehow or other to be popular enough. Mr. Froude tells us the

reasons. He was not born a bloated tyrant, any more than Queen Elizabeth (though the fact is not generally

known) was born a wizened old woman. He was from youth, till he was long past his grand climacteric, a

very handsome, powerful, and active man, temperate in his habits, goodhumoured, frank and honest in his

speech (as even his enemies are forced to confess). He seems to have been (as his portraits prove

sufficiently), for good and for evil, a thorough John Bull; a thorough Englishman: but one of the very highest

Mr. Froude has, of course, not written these words without having facts whereby to prove them. One he gives

in an important note containing an extract from a letter of the Venetian Ambassador in 1515. At least, if his

conclusions be correct, we must think twice ere we deny his assertion that 'the man best able of all living

Englishmen to govern England had been set to do it by the conditions of his birth.'

'We are bound,' as Mr. Froude says, 'to allow him the benefit of his past career, and be careful to remember it

in interpreting his later actions.' 'The true defect in his moral constitution, that "intense and imperious will"

common to all princes of the Plantagenet blood, had not yet been tested.' That he did, in his later years, act in

many ways neither wisely nor well, no one denies; that his conduct did not alienate the hearts of his subjects

is what needs explanation; and Mr. Froude's opinions on this matter, novel as they are, and utterly opposed to

that of the standard modern historians, require careful examination. Now I am not inclined to debate Henry

the Eighth's character, or any other subject, as between Mr. Froude and an author of the obscurantist or

pseudoconservative school. Mr. Froude is Liberal; and so am I. I wish to look at the question as between

Mr. Froude and other Liberals; and therefore, of course, first, as between Mr. Froude and Mr. Hallam.

Mr. Hallam's name is so venerable and his work so Important, that to set ourselves up as judges in this or in

any matter between him and Mr. Froude would be mere impertinence: but speaking merely as learners, we

have surely a right to inquire why Mr. Hallam has entered on the whole question of Henry's relations to his

Parliament with a praejudicium against them; for which Mr. Froude finds no ground whatsoever in fact. Why

are all acts both of Henry and his Parliament to be taken in malam partem? They were not Whigs, certainly:

neither were Socrates and Plato, nor even St. Paul and St. John. They may have been honest men as men go,

or they may not: but why is there to be a feeling against them rather than for them? Why is Henry always

called a tyrant, and his Parliament servile? The epithets have become so common and unquestioned that our

interrogation may seem startling. Still we make it. Why was Henry a tyrant? That may be true, but must be

proved by facts. Where are they? Is the mere fact of a monarch's asking for money a crime in him and his

ministers? The question would rather seem to be, Were the moneys for which Henry asked needed or no; and,

when granted, were they rightly or wrongly applied? And on these subjects we want much more information

than we obtain from any epithets. The author of a constitutional history should rise above epithets: or, if he

uses them, should corroborate them by facts. Why should not historians be as fair and as cautious in accusing

Henry and Wolsey as they would be in accusing Queen Victoria and Lord Palmerston? What right, allow us

to ask, has a grave constitutional historian to say that 'We cannot, indeed, doubt that the unshackled and

despotic condition of his friend, Francis I., afforded a mortifying contrast to Henry? What document exists in

which Henry is represented as regretting that he is the king of a free people?for such Mr. Hallam

confesses, just above, England was held to be, and was actually in comparison with France. If the document

does not exist, Mr. Hallam has surely stepped out of the field of the historian into that of the novelist, a la

Scott or Dumas. The Parliament sometimes grants Henry's demands: sometimes it refuses them, and he has to

help himself by other means. Why are both cases to be interpreted in malam partem? Why is the Parliament's

granting to be always a proof of its servility?its refusing always a proof of Henry's tyranny and rapacity?

Both views are mere praejudicia, reasonable perhaps, and possible: but why is not a praejudicium of the

opposite kind as rational and as possible? Why has not a historian a right to start, as Mr. Froude does, by

taking for granted that both parties may have been on the whole right; that the Parliament granted certain

sums because Henry was right in asking for them; refused others because Henry was wrong; even that, in

some cases, Henry may have been right in asking, the Parliament wrong in refusing; and that in such a case,

under the pressure of critical times, Henry was forced to get as he could the money which he saw that the

national cause required? Let it be as folks will. Let Henry be sometimes right, and the Parliament sometimes

likewise; or the Parliament always right, or Henry always right; or anything else, save this strange diseased

theory that both must have been always wrong, and that, evidence to that effect failing, motives must be

insinuated, or openly asserted, from the writer's mere imagination. This may be a dream: but it is as easy to

imagine as the other, and more pleasant also. It will probably be answered (though not by Mr. Hallam

himself) by a sneer: 'You do not seem to know much of the world, sir.' But so would Figaro and Gil Blas

Let us examine a stock instance of Henry's 'rapacity' and his Parliament's servility, namely, the exactions in

1524 and 1525, and the subsequent 'release of the King's debts.' What are the facts of the case? France and

Scotland had attacked England in 1514. The Scotch were beaten at Flodden. The French lost Tournay and

Therouenne, and, when peace was made, agreed to pay the expenses of the war. Times changed, and the

A similar war arose in 1524, and cost England immense sums. A large army was maintained on the Scotch

Border, another army invaded France; and Wolsey, not venturing to call a Parliament,because he was, as

Pope's legate, liable to a praemunire,raised money by contributions and benevolences, which were levied,

it seems on the whole, uniformly and equally (save that they weighed more heavily on the rich than on the

poor, if that be a fault), and differed from taxes only in not having received the consent of Parliament.

Doubtless, this was not the best way of raising money: but what if, under the circumstances, it were the only

one? What if, too, on the whole, the money so raised was really given willingly by the nation? The sequel

The first contribution for which Wolsey asked was paid. The second was resisted, and was not paid; proving

thereby that the nation need not pay unless it chose. The court gave way; and the war became defensive only

Then the tide turned. The danger, then, was not from Francis, but from the Emperor. Francis was taken

The effect of all this in England is told at large in Mr. Froude's second chapter. Henry became bond for

Francis's ransom, to be paid to the Emperor. He spent 500,000 crowns more in paying the French army; and

in the terms of peace made with France, a sumtotal was agreed on for the whole debt, old and new, to be

paid as soon as possible; and an annual pension of 500,000 crowns besides. The French exchequer, however,

Parliament, when it met in 1529, reviewed the circumstances of the expenditure, and finding it all such as the

nation on the whole approved, legalised the taxation by benevolences retrospectively: and this is the whole

mare's nest of the first payment of Henry's debts; if, at least, any faith is to be put in the preamble of the Act

for the release of the King's Debts, 21 Hen. VIII. c. 24. 'The King's loving subjects, the Lords Spiritual and

Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, calling to remembrance the inestimable

costs, charges, and expenses which the King's Highness hath necessarily been compelled to support and

sustain since his assumption to his crown, estate, and dignity royal, as well for the extinction of a right

dangerous and damnable schism, sprung in the Church, as for the modifying the insatiable and inordinate

ambition of them who, while aspiring to the monarchy of Christendom, did put universal troubles and

divisions in the same, intending, if they might, not only to have subdued this realm, but also all the rest, unto

their power and subjectionfor resistance whereof the King's Highness was compelled to marvellous

chargesboth for the supportation of sundry armies by sea and land, and also for divers and manifold

contribution on hand, to save and keep his own subjects at home in rest and reposewhich hath been so

politically handled that, when the most part of all Christian lands have been infested with cruel wars, the

great Head and Prince of the world (the Pope) brought into captivity, cities and towns taken, spoiled, burnt,

and sackedthe King's said subjects in all this time, by the high providence and politic means of his Grace,

have been nevertheless preserved, defended, and maintained from all these inconvenients, etc.

'Considering, furthermore, that his Highness, in and about the premises, hath been fain to employ not only all

such sums of money as hath risen or grown by contributions made unto his Grace by his loving subjectsbut

also, over and above the same, sundry other notable and excellent sums of his own treasure and yearly

revenues, among which manifold great sums so employed, his Highness also, as is notoriously known, and as

doth evidently appear by the ACCOUNTS OF THE SAME, hath to that use, and none other, converted all

such money as by any of his subjects hath been advanced to his Grace by way of prest or loan, either

particularly, or by any taxation made of the samebeing things so well collocate and bestowed, seeing the

said high and great fruits and effects thereof insured to the surety and commodity and tranquillity of this

realmof our mind and consent, do freely, absolutely, give and grant to the King's Highness all and every

The second release of the King's debts, in 1544, is very similar. The King's debts and necessities were really,

when we come to examine them, those of the nation: in 153840 England was put into a thorough state of

defence from end to end. Fortresses were built along the Scottish Border, and all along the coast opposite

France and Flanders. The people were drilled and armed, the fleet equipped; and the nation, for the time,

became one great army. And nothing but this, as may be proved by an overwhelming mass of evidence, saved

the country from invasion. Here were enormous necessary expenses which must be met.

In 1543 a million crowns were to have been paid by Francis the First as part of his old debt. It was not paid:

but, on the contrary, Henry had to go to war for it. The nation again relinquished their claim, and allowed

Henry to raise another benevolence in 1545, concerning which Mr. Hallam tells us a great deal, but not one

word of the political circumstances which led to it or to the release, keeping his sympathies and his paper for

the sorrows of refractory Alderman Reed, who, refusing (alone of all the citizens) to contribute to the support

of troops on the Scotch Border or elsewhere, was sent down, by a sort of rough justice, to serve on the Scotch

Border himself, and judge of the 'perils of the nation' with his own eyes; and beingone is pleased to

heartaken prisoner by the Scots, had to pay a great deal more as ransom than he would have paid as

But to return. What proof is there, in all this, of that servility which most historians, and Mr. Hallam among

the rest, are wont to attribute to Henry's Parliaments? What feeling appears on the face of this document,

which we have given and quoted, but one honourable to the nation? Through the falsehood of a foreign nation

the King is unable to perform his engagements to the people. Is not the just and generous course in such a

case to release him from those engagements? Does this preamble, does a single fact of the case, justify

historians in talking of these 'king's debts' in just the same tone as that in which they would have spoken if the

King had squandered the money on private pleasures? Perhaps most people who write small histories believe

that this really was the case. They certainly would gather no other impression from the pages of Mr. Hallam.

No doubt the act must have been burdensome on some people. Many, we are told, had bequeathed their

promissory notes to their children, used their reversionary interest in the loan in many ways; and these, of

course, felt the change very heavily. No doubt: but why have we not a right to suppose that the Parliament

were aware of that fact; but chose it as the less of the two evils? The King had spent the money; he was

unable to recover it from Francis; could only refund it by raising some fresh tax or benevolence: and why

may not the Parliament have considered the release of old taxes likely to offend fewer people than the

imposition of new ones? It is certainly an ugly thing to break public faith; but to prove that public faith was

broken, we must prove that Henry compelled the Parliament to release him; if the act was of their own free

will, no public faith was broken, for they were the representatives of the nation, and through them the nation

forgave its own debt. And what evidence have we that they did not represent the nation, and that, on the

whole, we must suppose, as we should in the case of any other men, that they best knew their own business?

May we not apply to this case, and to others, mutatis mutandis, the argument which Mr. Froude uses so

boldly and well in the case of Anne Boleyn's trial'The English nation also, as well as . . . deserves justice at

Certainly it does: but it is a disagreeable token of the method on which we have been accustomed to write the

history of our own forefathers, that Mr. Froude should find it necessary to state formally so very simple a

What proof, we ask again, is there that this old Parliament was 'servile'? Had that been so, Wolsey would not

have been afraid to summon it. The specific reason for not summoning a Parliament for six years after that of

1524 was that they were not servile; that when (here we are quoting Mr. Hallam, and not Mr. Froude) Wolsey

entered the House of Commons with a great train, seemingly for the purpose of intimidation, they 'made no

other answer to his harangues than that it was their usage to debate only among themselves.' The debates on

this occasion lasted fifteen or sixteen days, during which, says an eyewitness, 'there has been the greatest

and sorest hold in the Lower House,' 'the matter debated and beaten'; 'such hold that the House was like to

have been dissevered'; in a word, hard fightingand why not honest fighting?between the court party and

the Opposition, 'which ended,' says Mr. Hallam, 'in the court party obtaining, with the utmost difficulty, a

grant much inferior to the Cardinal's original requisition.' What token of servility is here?

And is it reasonable to suppose that after Wolsey was conquered, and a comparatively popular ministry had

succeeded, and that memorable Parliament of 1529 (which Mr. Froude, not unjustly, thinks more memorable

than the Long Parliament itself) began its great work with a high hand, backed not merely by the King, but by

the public opinion of the majority of England, their decisions are likely to have been more servile than

before? If they resisted the King when they disagreed with him, are they to be accused of servility because

they worked with him when they agreed with him? Is an Opposition always in the right; a ministerial party

always in the wrong? Is it an offence against the people to agree with the monarch, even when he agrees with

the people himself? Simple as these questions are, one must really stop to ask them.

No doubt pains were often taken to secure elections favourable to the Government. Are none taken now? Are

not more taken now? Will any historian show us the documents which prove the existence, in the sixteenth

century, of Reform Club, Carlton Club, whippersin and nominees, governmental and opposition, and all the

rest of the beautiful machinery which protects our Reformed Parliament from the evil influences of bribery

and corruption? Pah!We have somewhat too much glass in our modern House to afford to throw stones at

our forefathers' old St. Stephen's. At the worst, what was done then but that without which it is said to be

impossible to carry on a Government now? Take an instance from the Parliament of 1539, one in which there

is no doubt Government influence was used in order to prevent as much as possible the return of members

favourable to the clergyfor the good reason that the clergy were no doubt, on their own side, intimidating

voters by all those terrors of the unseen world which had so long been to them a source of boundless profit

Cromwell writes to the King to say that he has secured a seat for a certain Sir Richard Morrison; but for what

purpose? As one who no doubt 'should be ready to answer and take up such as should crack or face with

literature of learning, if any such should be.' There was, then, free discussion; they expected clever and

learned speakers in the Opposition, and on subjects of the deepest import, not merely political, but spiritual;

and the Government needed men to answer such. What more natural than that so close on the 'Pilgrimage of

Grace,' and in the midst of so great dangers at home and abroad, the Government should have done their best

to secure a welldisposed House (one would like to know when they would not)? But surely the very effort

(confessedly exceptional) and the acknowledged difficulty prove that Parliament were no mere 'registrars of

But the strongest argument against the tyranny of the Tudors, and especially of Henry VIII. in his

'benevolences,' is derived from the state of the people themselves. If these benevolences had been really

unpopular, they would not have been paid. In one case we have seen, a benevolence was not paid for that

very reason. For the method of the Tudor sovereigns, like that of their predecessors, was the very opposite to

that of tyrants in every age and country. The first act of a tyrant has always been to disarm the people, and to

surround himself with a standing army. The Tudor method was, as Mr. Froude shows us by many interesting

facts, to keep the people armed and drilled, even to compel them to learn the use of weapons. Throughout

England spread one vast military organisation, which made every adult a soldier, and enabled him to find, at a

day's notice, his commanding officer, whether landlord, sheriff, or lieutenant of the county; so that, as a

foreign ambassador of the time remarks with astonishment (we quote from memory), 'England is the

strongest nation on earth, for though the King has not a single mercenary soldier, he can raise in three days an

And of what temper those men were it is well known enough. Mr. Froude calls themand we beg leave to

endorse, without exception, Mr. Froude's opinion'A sturdy highhearted race, sound in body and fierce in

spirit, and furnished with thews and sinews which, under the stimulus of those "great shins of beef," their

common diet, were the wonder of the age.' 'What comyn folke in all this world,' says a State Paper in 1515,

'may compare with the comyns of England in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What

comyn folk is so mighty, so strong in the felde, as the comyns of England?' In authentic stories of actions

under Henry VIII.and, we will add, under Elizabeth likewisewhere the accuracy of the account is

undeniable, no disparity of force made Englishmen shrink from enemies whenever they could meet them.

Again and again a few thousands of them carried dismay into the heart of France. Four hundred adventurers,

vagabond apprentices of London, who formed a volunteer corps in the Calais garrison, were for years, Hall

says, the terror of Normandy. In the very frolic of conscious power they fought and plundered without pay,

without reward, save what they could win for themselves; and when they fell at last, they fell only when

surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in careless desperation. Invariably, by friend

and foe alike, the English are described as the fiercest people in all EuropeEnglish wild beasts Benvenuto

Cellini calls them; and this great physical power they owed to the profuse abundance in which they lived, to

Mr. Froude's novel assertion about profuse abundance must be weighed by those who have read his

invaluable introductory chapter. But we must ask at once how it was possible to levy on such an armed

populace a tax which they were determined not to pay, and felt that they were not bound to pay, either in law

or justice? Conceive Lord Palmerston's sending down to demand a 'benevolence' from the army at Aldershot,

beginning with the general in command and descending to the privates . . . What would be the consequences?

Ugly enough: but gentle in comparison with those of any attempt to exact a really unpopular tax from a

nation of wellarmed Englishmen, unless they, on the whole, thought the tax fit to be paid. They would

grumble, of course, whether they intended to pay or not,for were they not Englishmen, our own flesh and

blood?and grumble all the more in person, because they had no Press to grumble for them: but what is

there then in the M.P.'s letter to Lord Surrey, quoted by Mr. Hallam, p. 25, or in the more pointed letter of

Warham's, two pages on, which we do not see lying on our breakfast tables in half the newspapers every

week? Poor, pedantic, obstructive old Warham, himself very angry at so much being asked of his brother

clergymen, and at their being sworn as to the value of their goods (so like are old times to new ones); and

being, on the whole, of opinion that the world (the Church included) is going to the devil, says that as he has

been 'showed in a secret manner of his friends, the people sore grudgeth and murmureth, and speaketh

cursedly among themselves, as far as they dare, saying they shall never have rest of payments as long as some

liveth, and that they had better die than thus be continually handed, reckoning themselves, their wives and

children, as despoulit, and not greatly caring what they do, or what becomes of them.'

Very dreadfulif true: which last point depends very much upon who Warham was. Now, on reading Mr.

Froude's or any other good history, we shall find that Warham was one of the leaders of that despondent party

which will always have its antitype in England. Have we, too, not heard within the last seven years similar

prophecies of desolation, mourning, and woeof the Church tottering on the verge of ruin, the peasantry

starving under the horrors of free trade, noble families reduced to the verge of beggary by double

incometax? Even such a prophet seems Warham to have beenof all people in that day, one of the last

Poor old Warham, however, was not so far wrong in this particular case; for the 'despoulit' slaves of Suffolk,

not content with grumbling, rose up with sword and bow, and vowed that they would not pay. Whereon the

bloated tyrant sent his praetorians, and enforced payment by scourge and thumbscrew? Not in the least. They

would not pay; and therefore, being free men, nobody could make them pay; and although in the

neighbouring county of Norfolk, from twenty pounds (i.e. 200 pounds of our money) upwardfor the tax

was not levied on men of less substancethere were not twenty but what had consented; and though there

was 'great likelihood that this grant should be much more than the loan was' (the 'salt tears' shed by the

gentlemen of Norfolk proceeding, says expressly the Duke of Norfolk, 'only from doubt how to find money

to content the King's Highness'); yet the King and Wolsey gave way frankly and at once, and the contribution

was remitted, although the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, writing to Wolsey, treat the insurrection lightly,

From all which factsthey are Mr. Hallam's, not Mr. Froude'swe can deduce not tyranny, but lenity, good

sense, and the frank withdrawal from a wrong position as soon as the unwillingness of the people proved it to

This instance is well brought forward (though only in a line or two, by Mr. Froude) as one among many

proofs that the working classes in Henry the Eighth's time 'enjoyed an abundance far beyond that which in

general falls to the lot of that order in longsettled countries, incomparably beyond what the same class were

enjoying at that very time in Germany or France. The laws secured them; and that the laws were put in force,

we have the direct evidence of successive acts of the Legislature, justifying the general policy by its success:

and we have also the indirect evidence of the contented loyalty of the great body of the people, at a time

when, if they had been discontented, they held in their own hands the means of asserting what the law

acknowledged to be their right. 'The Government,' as we have just shown at length, 'had no power to compel

injustice . . . If the peasantry had been suffering under any real grievances we should have heard of them

when the religious rebellions furnished so fair an opportunity to press them forward. Complaint was loud

Such broad facts as thesefor facts they areought to make us pause ere we boast of the greater liberty

enjoyed by Englishmen of the present day, as compared with the tyranny of Tudor times. Thank God, there is

no lack of that blessing now: but was there any real lack of it then? Certainly the outward notes of a tyranny

exist now in far greater completeness than then. A standing army, a Government police, ministries who bear

no love to a militia, and would consider the compulsory arming and drilling of the people as a dangerous

insanity, do not look at first sight as much like 'free institutions' as a Government which, though again and

again in danger not merely of rebellion, but of internecine wars of succession, so trusted the people as to

force weapons into their hands from boyhood. Let us not be mistaken: we are no hankerers after

retrogression: the present system works very well; let it be; all that we say is that the imputation of despotic

institutions lies, prima facie, rather against the reign of Queen Victoria than against that of King Henry the

Eighth. Of course it is not so in fact. Many modern methods, which are despotic in appearance, are not so in

practice. Let us believe that the same was the case in the sixteenth century. Our governors now understand

their own business best, and make a very fair compromise between discipline and freedom. Let us believe

that the men of the sixteenth century did so likewise. All we ask is that our forefathers should be judged as

we wish to be judged ourselves, 'not according to outward appearance, but with righteous judgment.'

Mr. Froude finds the cause of this general contentment and loyalty of the masses in the extreme care which

the Government took of their wellbeing. The introductory chapter, in which he proves to his own

satisfaction the correctness of his opinion, is well worth the study of our political economists. The facts

which he brings seem certainly overwhelming; of course, they can only be met by counter facts; and our

knowledge does not enable us either to corroborate or refute his statements. The chief argument used against

them seems to us, at least, to show that for some cause or other the working classes were prosperous enough.

It is said the Acts of Parliament regulating wages do not fix the minimum of wages, but the maximum. They

are not intended to defend the employed against the employer, but the employer against the employed, in a

defective state of the labour market, when the workmen, by the fewness of their numbers, were enabled to

make extravagant demands. Let this be the casewe do not say that it is sowhat is it but a token of

prosperity among the working classes? A labour market so thin that workmen can demand their own price for

their labour, till Parliament is compelled to bring them to reason, is surely a time of prosperity to the

employed a time of full work and high wages; of full stomachs, inclined from very prosperity to 'wax fat

and kick.' If, however, any learned statistician should be able to advance, on the opposite side of the question,

enough to weaken some of Mr. Froude's conclusions, he must still, if he be a just man, do honour to the noble

morality of this most striking chapter, couched as it is in as perfect English as we have ever had the delight of

reading. We shall leave, then, the battle of facts to be fought out by statisticians, always asking Mr. Froude's

readers to bear in mind that, though other facts may be true, yet his facts are no less true likewise; and we

shall quote at length, both as a specimen of his manner and of his matter, the last three pages of this

introductory chapter, in which, after speaking of the severity of the laws against vagrancy, and showing how

they were excused by the organisation which found employment for every able bodied man, he goes on to

'A measure so extreme in its severity was partly dictated by policy. The state of the country was critical; and

the danger from questionable persons traversing it, unexamined and uncontrolled, was greater than at

ordinary times. But in point of justice as well as of prudence it harmonised with the iron temper of the age,

and it answered well for the government of a fierce and powerful people, in whose hearts lay an intense

hatred of rascality, and among whom no one could have lapsed into evil courses except by deliberate

preference for them. The moral sinew of the English must have been strong indeed when it admitted of such

stringent bracing; but, on the whole, they were ruled as they preferred to be ruled; and if wisdom can be

tested by success, the manner in which they passed the great crisis of the Reformation is the best justification

of their princes. The era was great throughout Europe. The Italians of the age of Michael Angelo, the

Spaniards who were the contemporaries of Cortez, the Germans who shook off the Pope at the call of Luther,

and the splendid chivalry of Francis I. of France, were no common men. But they were all brought face to

face with the same trials, and none met them as the English met them. The English alone never lost their

selfpossession, and if they owed something to fortune in their escape from anarchy, they owed more to the

'In the brief review of the system under which England was governed, we have seen a state of things in which

the principles of political economy were, consciously or unconsciously, contradicted; where an attempt, more

or less successful, was made to bring the production and distribution of wealth under the moral rule of right

or wrong; and where those laws of supply and demand, which we are now taught to regard as immutable

ordinances of nature, were absorbed or superseded by a higher code. It is necessary for me to repeat that I am

not holding up the sixteenth century as a model which the nineteenth might safely follow. The population has

become too large, and employment too complicated and fluctuating, to admit of such control; while, in

default of control, the relapse upon selfinterest as the one motive principle is certain to ensue, and, when it

ensues, is absolute in its operations. But as, even with us, these socalled ordinances of nature in time of war

consent to be suspended, and duty to his country becomes with every good citizen a higher motive of action

than the advantages which he may gain in an enemy's market; so it is not uncheering to look back upon a time

when the nation was in a normal condition of militancy against social injusticewhen the Government was

enabled, by happy circumstances, to pursue into detail a single and serious aim at the

wellbeingwellbeing in its widest senseof all members of the commonwealth. There were difficulties

and drawbacks at that time as well as this. Of Liberty, in the modern sense of the wordof the supposed

right of every man "to do what he will with his own," or with himselfthere was no idea. To the question, if

ever it was asked, "May I not do what I will with my own?" there was the brief answer, "No man may do

what is wrong, either with what is his own or with what is another's." Producers, too, who were not permitted

to drive down their workmen's wages by competition, could not sell their goods as cheaply as they might

have done, and the consumer paid for the law in an advance of price; but the burden, though it fell heavily on

the rich, lightly touched the poor and the rich consented cheerfully to a tax which ensured the loyalty of the

people. The working man of modern times has bought the extension of his liberty at the price of his material

comfort. The higher classes have gained in wealth what they have lost in power. It is not for the historian to

Our forefathers, then, were not free, if we attach to that word the meaning which our Transatlantic brothers

seem inclined to give to it. They had not learnt to deify selfwill, and to claim for each member of the human

race a right to the indulgence of every eccentricity. They called themselves free, and boasted of their

freedom; but their conception of liberty was that of all old nations, a freedom which not only allowed of

discipline, but which grew out of it. No people had less wish to exalt the kingly power into that specious

tyranny, a paternal Government; the king was with them, and always had been, both formally and really,

subject to their choice; bound by many oaths to many duties; the minister, not the master of the people. But

their whole conception of political life was, nevertheless, shaped by their conception of family life. Strict

obedience, stern discipline, compulsory education in practical duties, was the law of the latter; without such

training they thought their sons could never become in any true sense men. And when they grew up, their

civic life was to be conducted on the same principles, for the very purpose of enabling them to live as

members of a free nation. If the self will of the individual was curbed, now and then, needlesslyas it is

the nature of all human methods to caricature themselves at times the purpose was, not to weaken the man,

but to strengthen him by strengthening the body to which he belonged. The nation was to be free,

selfhelping, selfcontaining, unconquerable; to that great purpose the will, the fancyeven, if need be, the

mortal life of the individual, must give way. Men must be trained at all costs in self restraint, because only

so could they become heroes in the day of danger; in selfsacrifice for the common good, because only so

would they remain united, while foreign nations and evil home influences were trying to tear them asunder.

In a word, their conception of life was as a warfare; their organisation that of a regiment. It is a question

whether the conception of corporate life embodied in a regiment or army be not, after all, the best working

one for this world. At least the problem of a perfect society, howsoever beautiful on paper, will always issue

in a compromise, more or less perfectlet us hope more and more perfect as the centuries roll on between

the strictness of military discipline and the Irishman's laissezfaire ideal, wherein 'every man should do that

which was right in the sight of his own eyes, and wrong too, if he liked.' At least, such had England been for

centuries; under such a system had she thriven; a fact which, duly considered, should silence somewhat those

gentlemen who, not being of a military turn themselves, inform Europe so patriotically and so prudently that

From this dogma we beg leave to differ utterly. Britain is at this moment, in our eyes, the only military nation

in Europe. All other nations seem to us to have military governments, but not to be military themselves. As

proof of the assertion, we appeal merely to the existence of our militia. While other nations are employing

conscription, we have raised in twelve months a noble army, every soul of which has volunteered as a free

man; and yet, forsooth, we are not a military nation! We are not ashamed to tell how, but the other day,

standing in the rear of those militia regiments, no matter where, a flush of pride came over us at the sight of

those lads, but a few months since helpless and awkward country boors, now full of sturdy intelligence,

cheerful obedience, and the manhood which can afford to be respectful to others, because it respects itself,

and knows that it is respected in turn. True, they had not the lightness, the order, the practical ease, the

cunning self helpfulness of the splendid German legionaries who stood beside them, the breast of every

other private decorated with clasps and medals for service in the wars of seven years since. As an invading

body, perhaps, one would have preferred the Germans; but only because experience had taught them already

what it would teach in twelve months to the Berkshire or Cambridge 'clod.' There, to us, was the true test of

England's military qualities; her young men had come by tens of thousands, of their own free will, to be made

soldiers of by her country gentlemen, and treated by them the while as men to be educated, not as things to be

compelled; not driven like sheep to the slaughter, to be disciplined by men with whom they had no bond but

the mere official one of military obedience; and 'What,' we ask ourselves, 'does England lack to make her a

second Rome?' Her people have physical strength, animal courage, that selfdependence of freemen which

enabled at Inkerman the privates to fight on literally without officers, every man for his own hand. She has

inventive genius, enormous wealth; and if, as is said, her soldiers lack at present the selfhelpfulness of the

Zouave, it is ridiculous to suppose that that quality could long be wanting in the men of a nation which is at

this moment the foremost in the work of emigration and colonisation. If organising power and military

system be, as is said, lacking in high quarters, surely there must be organising power enough somewhere in

the greatest industrial nation upon earth, ready to come forward when there is a real demand for it; and

whatever be the defects of our system, we are surely not as far behind Prussia or France as Rome was behind

the Carthaginians and the Greeks whom she crushed. A few years sufficed for them to learn all they needed

from their enemies; fewer still would suffice us to learn from our friends. Our working classes are not, like

those of America, in a state of physical comfort too great to make it worth while for them to leave their home

occupations; and whether that be a good or an evil, it at least ensures us, as our militia proves, an almost

inexhaustible supply of volunteers. What a new and awful scene for the world's drama, did such a nation as

this once set before itself, steadily and ruthlessly, as Rome did of old, the idea of conquest. Even now,

waging war as she has done, as it were, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] thinking war too

unimportant a part of her work to employ on it her highest intellects, her flag has advanced in the last fifty

years over more vast and richer tracts than that of any European nation upon earth. What keeps her from the

This: that, thank God, she has a conscience still; that, feeling intensely the sacredness of her own national

life, she has learned to look on that of other people's as sacred also; and since, in the fifteenth century, she

finally repented of that wild and unrighteous dream of conquering France, she has discovered more and more

that true military greatness lies in the power of defence, and not of attack; not in waging war, but being able

to wage it; and has gone on her true mission of replenishing the earth more peacefully, on the whole, and

more humanely, than did ever nation before her; conquering only when it was necessary to put down the

lawlessness of the savage few for the wellbeing of the civilised many. This has been her idea; she may have

confused it and herself in Caffre or in Chinese wars; for who can always be true to the light within him? But

this has been her idea; and therefore she stands and grows and thrives, a virgin land for now eight hundred

But a fancy has come over us during the last blessed forty years of unexampled peace, from which our

ancestors of the sixteenth century were kept by stern and yet most wholesome lessons; the fancy that peace,

and not war, is the normal condition of the world. The fancy is so fair that we blame none who cherish it;

after all they do good by cherishing it; they point us to an ideal which we should otherwise forget, as

Babylon, Rome, France in the seventeenth century, forgot utterly. Only they are in haste (and pardonable

haste too) to realise that ideal, forgetting that to do so would be really to stop short of it, and to rest contented

in some form of human society far lower than that which God has actually prepared for those who love Him.

Better to believe that all our conceptions of the height to which the human race might attain are poor and

paltry compared with that toward which God is guiding it, and for which he is disciplining it by awful

lessons: and to fight on, if need be, ruthless, and yet full of pityand many a noble soul has learnt within the

last two years how easy it is to reconcile in practice that seeming paradox of wordssmiting down stoutly

evil wheresoever we shall find it, and saying, 'What ought to be, we know not; God alone can know: but that

We repeat it: war, in some shape or other, is the normal condition of the world. It is a fearful fact: but we

shall not abolish it by ignoring it, and ignoring by the same method the teaching of our Bibles. Not in mere

metaphor does the gospel of Love describe the life of the individual good man as a perpetual warfare. Not in

mere metaphor does the apostle of Love see in his visions of the world's future no Arcadian shepherd

paradises, not even a perfect civilisation, but an eternal war in heaven, wrath and woe, plague and earthquake;

and amid the everlasting storm, the voices of the saints beneath the altar crying, 'Lord, how long?' Shall we

pretend to have more tender hearts than the old man of Ephesus, whose dying sermon, so old legends say,

was nought but'Little children, love one another'; and who yet could denounce the liar and the hater and

the covetous man, and proclaim the vengeance of God against all evildoers, with all the fierceness of an

Isaiah? It was enough for himlet it be enough for usthat he should see, above the thunder cloud, and

the rain of blood, and the scorpion swarm, and the great angel calling all the fowl of heaven to the supper of

the great God, that they might eat the flesh of kings and valiant men, a city of God eternal in the heavens, and

yet eternally descending among men; a perfect order, justice, love, and peace, becoming actual more and

Let that be enough for us: but do not let us fancy that what is true of the two extremes must not needs be true

of the mean also; that while the life of the individual and of the universe is one of perpetual selfdefence, the

life of the nation can be aught else: or that any appliances of scientific comforts, any intellectual cultivation,

even any of the most direct and commonsense arguments of selfinterest, can avail to quiet in man those

outbursts of wrath, ambition, cupidity, wounded pride, which have periodically convulsed, and will convulse

to the end, the human race. The philosopher in his study may prove their absurdity, their suicidal folly, till,

deluded by the strange lull of a forty years' peace, he may look on wars as in the same category with

flagellantisms, witchmanias, and other 'popular delusions,' as insanities of the past, impossible henceforth;

and may prophesy, as really wise political economists were doing in 1847, that mankind had grown too

sensible to go to war any more. And behold, the peace proves only to be the lull before the thunderstorm; and

one electric shock sets free forces unsuspected, transcendental, supernatural in the deepest sense; forces

which we can no more stop, by shrieks at their absurdity, from incarnating themselves in actual blood, and

misery, and horror, than we can control the madman in his paroxysm by telling him that he is a madman. And

so the fair vision of the student is buried once more in rack and hail and driving storm; and, like Daniel of old

when rejoicing over the coming restoration of his people, he sees beyond the victory some darker struggle

still, and lets his notes of triumph die away into a wail,'And the end thereof shall be with a flood; and to

It is as impossible as it would be unwise to conceal from ourselves the fact that all the Continental nations

look upon our present peace as but transitory, momentary; and on the Crimean war as but the prologue to a

fearful dramaall the more fearful because none knows its purpose, its plot, which character will be

assumed by any given actor, and, least of all, the denouement of the whole. All that they feel and know is that

everything which has happened since 1848 has exasperated, not calmed, the electric tension of the European

atmosphere; that a rottenness, rapidly growing intolerable alike 'to God and the enemies of God,' has eaten

into the vitals of Continental life; that their rulers know neither where they are nor whither they are going,

and only pray that things may last out their time: all notes which one would interpret as proving the Continent

to be already ripe for subjection to some one devouring race of conquerors, were there not a ray of hope in an

expectation, even more painful to our human pity, which is held by some of the wisest among the Germans;

namely, that the coming war will fast resolve into no struggle between bankrupt monarchs and their

respective armies, but a war between nations themselves, an internecine war of opinions and of creeds. There

are wise Germans now who prophesy, with sacred tears, a second 'Thirty Years' War,' with all its frantic

horrors, for their hapless country, which has found two centuries too short a time wherein to recover from the

exhaustion of that first fearful scourge. Let us trust, if that war shall beget its new Tillys and Wallensteins, it

shall also beget its new Gustavus Adolphus, and many another child of Light: but let us not hope that we can

stand by in idle comfort, and that when the overflowing scourge passes by it shall not reach to us. Shame to

us, were that our destiny! Shame to us, were we to refuse our share in the struggles of the human race, and to

stand by in idle comfort while the Lord's battles are being fought. Honour to us, if in that day we have chosen

for our leaders, as our forefathers of the sixteenth century did, men who see the work which God would have

them do, and have hearts and heads to do it. Honour to us, if we spend this transient lull, as our forefathers of

the sixteenth century did, in setting our house in order, in redressing every grievance, reforming every abuse,

knitting the hearts of the British nation together by practical care and help between class and class, man and

man, governor and governed, that we may bequeath to our children, as Henry the Eighth's men did to theirs, a

British national life, so united and wholehearted, so clear in purpose and sturdy in execution, so trained to

know the right side at the first glance and take it, that they shall look back with love and honour upon us,

their fathers, determined to carry out, even to the death, the method which we have bequeathed to them.

Then, if God will that the powers of evil, physical and spiritual, should combine against this land, as they did

in the days of good Queen Bess, we shall not have lived in vain; for those who, as in Queen Bess's days,

thought to yoke for their own use a labouring ox, will find, as then, that they have roused a lion from his den.

{1} North British Review, No. LI., November 1856.'A History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the

Death of Elizabeth.' By J. A. Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter college, Oxford. London: J. W. Parker and