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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Froude's History of England, by Charles
+Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Froude's History of England
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+
+
+Release Date: December 26, 2014  [eBook #3144]
+[This file was first posted on January 2, 2001]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND***
+
+
+Transcribed from “Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays” 1890
+Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                    FROUDE’S HISTORY OF ENGLAND {219}
+
+
+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 arch-knaves.  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 same—that 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 laughing at them?
+
+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 by which Sir
+Archibald Alison would still explain the French Revolution—
+
+    ‘The dog, to serve his private ends,
+    Went mad, and bit the man?’
+
+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 pseudo-ideal.  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
+anti-national pretensions.  They are the outcome of an utterly un-English
+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 party—almost any
+Christian—purpose.  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 for it.
+
+There is, indeed, no intrinsic cause why the ecclesiastical, or
+pseudo-Catholic, 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, _primâ 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 history—even of his ‘Pucelle d’Orléans’,—is simply the
+humanity of Sanchez and the rest of those _vingtquatre Pères_ 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 truth-revealing 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
+imperfectly and confusedly they may have learnt his lessons?  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
+steam-engine 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 races—that is, to all races who
+have left aught behind them better than mere mounds of earth—to 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
+midden-flies 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 steam-engine, 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 Minié 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 second-hand capital for hustings-speeches and railway books, and
+flatter a mechanics’ institute of self-satisfied 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 time—on 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 science could not have had a being.
+
+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 now as it was to the
+worthies of old time.
+
+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, instead of being
+infinitely worse off, than she was three hundred years ago?
+
+At home, too—But 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 root-laws 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 well-known 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 not—what
+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 self-conceit, 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, self-seeking, 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 boy-mechanic 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 himself—as
+Mr. Froude has attempted to do, and as we think successfully—into 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 marsh-croaker, 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 flunkey-nature (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 well—Spirit of Quevedo! finish for us
+the picture which we cannot finish for ourselves.
+
+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 free-spoken people; and he, we suppose, could
+comprehend as little as we can the reasoning of such a passage as the
+following, especially when it proceeds from the pen of so wise and
+venerable a writer as Mr. Hallam.
+
+‘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
+servility of man endured.’
+
+The names of even those few we should be glad to have; for it seems to us
+that, with the exception of a few ultra-Protestants, 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 honest and respectful
+history.
+
+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 good-tempered 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 soon as he has brought his history down to the end of Henry
+the Eighth’s reign.
+
+But Mr. Froude’s chief text-book 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, credulity, peevishness, spite, of
+any and every gossip and scribbler.
+
+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
+hereafter.
+
+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 _præmunire_, 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 England, and which finally draws down ruin
+upon Wolsey himself.
+
+This appears to have begun in the winter of 1526–27.  It was proposed to
+marry the Princess Mary to a son of the French king.  The Bishop of
+Tarbés, 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 coarse-minded 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 heir-male, etc., the
+realm was like to come to dissolution.’  Too good reason for the bold
+assertion of the Cardinal-Governor of Bologna, that ‘he knew the guise of
+England as few men did, and that if the King should die without
+heirs-male, 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 heir-male.’  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 time-serving 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 save the
+souls of men; and the Reformation followed as a matter of course.
+
+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 her—faithfully as he had kept (with one exception) to that loveless
+_mariage de convenance_—may 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 mis-education, 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 pre-engagement 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 punishment.
+
+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 received its irrecoverable wound.
+
+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 fellow-servants of the
+Pope, and twin-pillars 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 re-married, the succession settled, and the laws and the Church
+reformed, he would retire from the world, and would serve God the
+remainder of his days.’
+
+Peace be with him!  He was surely a noble soul; misled, it may be—as 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 have wasted his energies on a dream.
+
+And on a dream he did waste them, in spite of all his cunning.  As Mr.
+Froude, in a noble passage, says:—
+
+    ‘Extravagant as his hopes seem, the prospect of realising them was,
+    humanly speaking, neither chimerical nor even improbable.  He had but
+    made the common mistake of men of the world, who are the
+    representatives of an old order of things, when that order is doomed
+    and dying.  He could not read the signs of the times; and confounding
+    the barrenness of death with the barrenness of winter, which might be
+    followed by a new spring and summer, he believed that the old
+    life-tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground,
+    might bloom again in its old beauty.  The thing which he called
+    heresy was the fire of Almighty God, which no politic congregation of
+    princes, no state machinery, though it were never so active, could
+    trample out; and as, in the early years of Christianity, the meanest
+    slave who was thrown to the wild beasts for his presence at the
+    forbidden mysteries of the Gospel saw deeper, in the divine power of
+    his faith, into the future even of this earthly world, than the
+    sagest of his imperial persecutors,—so a truer political prophet than
+    Wolsey would have been found in the most ignorant of those poor men
+    for whom his police were searching in the purlieus of London, who
+    were risking death and torture in disseminating the pernicious
+    volumes of the English Testament.’
+
+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 honestly be found.
+
+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. {246}  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, were sound-headed practical Englishmen.
+
+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 be ashamed.
+
+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 ‘black-wash,’ 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 death—a 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, good-humoured, 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
+type.
+
+    ‘Had he died (says Mr. Froude) previous to the first agitation of the
+    divorce, his loss would have been deplored as one of the heaviest
+    misfortunes which had ever befallen this country, and he would have
+    left a name which would have taken its place in history by the side
+    of the Black Prince or the Conqueror of Agincourt.  Left at the most
+    trying age, with his character unformed, with the means of gratifying
+    every inclination, and married by his ministers, when a boy, to an
+    unattractive woman far his senior, he had lived for thirty-six years
+    almost without blame, and bore through England the reputation of an
+    upright and virtuous king.  Nature had been prodigal to him of her
+    rarest gifts . . . Of his intellectual ability we are not left to
+    judge from the suspicious panegyrics of his contemporaries.  His
+    State Papers and letters may be placed by the side of those of Wolsey
+    or of Cromwell, and they lose nothing by the comparison.  Though they
+    are broadly different, the perception is equally clear, the
+    expression equally powerful; and they breathe throughout an
+    irresistible vigour of purpose.  In addition to this, he had a fine
+    musical taste, carefully cultivated; he spoke and wrote in four
+    languages; and his knowledge of a multitude of subjects, with which
+    his versatile ability made him conversant, would have formed the
+    reputation of any ordinary man.  He was among the best physicians of
+    his age.  He was his own engineer, inventing improvements in
+    artillery and new constructions in shipbuilding; and this not with
+    the condescending incapacity of a royal amateur, but with thorough
+    workmanlike understanding.  His reading was vast, especially in
+    theology.  He was ‘attentive,’ as it is called, ‘to his religious
+    duties,’ being present at the services in chapel two or three times a
+    day with unfailing regularity, and showing, to outward appearance, a
+    real sense of religious obligation in the energy and purity of his
+    life.  In private he was good-humoured and good-natured.  His letters
+    to his secretaries, though never undignified, are simple, easy, and
+    unrestrained, and the letters written by them to him are similarly
+    plain and business-like, as if the writers knew that the person whom
+    they were addressing disliked compliments, and chose to be treated as
+    a man.  He seems to have been always kind, always considerate;
+    inquiring into their private concerns with genuine interest, and
+    winning, as a consequence, their sincere and unaffected attachment.
+    As a ruler he had been eminently popular.  All his wars had been
+    successful.  He had the splendid tastes in which the English people
+    most delighted; . . . he had more than once been tried with
+    insurrection, which he had soothed down without bloodshed, and
+    extinguished in forgiveness . . . And it is certain that if he had
+    died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VIII., like the Roman
+    emperor said by Tacitus to have been _censensu omnium dignus imperii
+    nisi imperasset_, would have been considered by posterity as formed
+    by Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would
+    have been deplored as a perpetual calamity.’
+
+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
+pseudo-conservative 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 _præjudicium_
+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, _à 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 _præjudicia_, reasonable perhaps, and possible: but
+why is not a _præjudicium_ 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
+have said, and on exactly the same grounds.
+
+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 Thérouenne, and, when
+peace was made, agreed to pay the expenses of the war.  Times changed,
+and the expenses were not paid.
+
+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 _præmunire_,—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 alone could decide that.
+
+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
+till 1525.
+
+Then the tide turned.  The danger, then, was not from Francis, but from
+the Emperor.  Francis was taken prisoner at Pavia; and shortly after Rome
+was sacked by Bourbon.
+
+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 sum-total 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, still
+remained bankrupt, and again the money was not paid.
+
+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 subjection—for resistance whereof
+the King’s Highness was compelled to marvellous charges—both 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 repose—which 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 sacked—the 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 subjects—but
+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 same—being 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 realm—of our
+mind and consent, do freely, absolutely, give and grant to the King’s
+Highness all and every sum or sums of money,’ etc.
+
+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 1538–40 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 being—one is pleased to hear—taken
+prisoner by the Scots, had to pay a great deal more as ransom than he
+would have paid as benevolence.
+
+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 our
+hands?’
+
+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
+truth.
+
+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 eye-witness, ‘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 fighting—and 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, whippers-in 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 clergy—for 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 and power.
+
+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 well-disposed 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 edicts.’
+
+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 army of two hundred
+thousand men.’
+
+And of what temper those men were it is well known enough.  Mr. Froude
+calls them—and we beg leave to endorse, without exception, Mr. Froude’s
+opinion—‘A sturdy high-hearted 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 likewise—where 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 Europe—English wild beasts Benvenuto Cellini calls
+them; and this great physical power they owed to the profuse abundance in
+which they lived, to the soldier’s training in which every one of them
+was bred from childhood.
+
+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 well-armed
+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 dreadful—if 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
+woe—of 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 income-tax?  Even such a prophet seems Warham to have
+been—of all people in that day, one of the last whom one would have asked
+for an opinion.
+
+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 prætorians, 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 of our money)
+upward—for the tax was not levied on men of less substance—there 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, and seem to object to
+the remission as needless.
+
+From all which facts—they are Mr. Hallam’s, not Mr. Froude’s—we 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
+be a wrong one.
+
+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 long-settled 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 enough, when complaint was just, under the Somerset
+Protectorate.’
+
+Such broad facts as these—for facts they are—ought 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, _primâ 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 well-being.
+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 case—we do not
+say that it is so—what 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 say:—
+
+    ‘It was therefore the expressed conviction of the English nation that
+    it was better for a man not to live at all than to live a profitless
+    and worthless life.  The vagabond was a sore spot upon the
+    commonwealth, to be healed by wholesale discipline if the gangrene
+    was not incurable; to be cut away with the knife if the milder
+    treatment of the cart-whip failed to be of profit.
+
+    ‘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
+    self-possession, and if they owed something to fortune in their
+    escape from anarchy, they owed more to the strong hand and steady
+    purpose of their rulers.
+
+    ‘To conclude this chapter, then.
+
+    ‘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 self-interest as the
+    one motive principle is certain to ensue, and, when it ensues, is
+    absolute in its operations.  But as, even with us, these so-called
+    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 injustice—when the
+    Government was enabled, by happy circumstances, to pursue into detail
+    a single and serious aim at the well-being—well-being in its widest
+    sense—of 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 word—of the supposed right of every man “to do
+    what he will with his own,” or with himself—there 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 balance advantages.  His duty
+    is with the facts.’
+
+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 self-will, 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, needlessly—as 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, self-helping, self-containing, unconquerable; to
+that great purpose the will, the fancy—even, 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 self-sacrifice 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 perfect—let us hope more and more perfect as the
+centuries roll on—between the strictness of military discipline and the
+Irishman’s _laissez-faire_ 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 ‘England is not a military nation.’
+
+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 self-dependence
+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
+self-helpfulness 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, ἐν παρεργᾷ, 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 dream which lured to their destruction Babylon, Macedonia, Rome?
+
+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
+well-being 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 years.
+
+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 pity—and many a noble soul has learnt
+within the last two years how easy it is to reconcile in practice that
+seeming paradox of words—smiting down stoutly evil wheresoever we shall
+find it, and saying, ‘What ought to be, we know not; God alone can know:
+but that this ought not to be, we do know, and here, in God’s name, it
+shall not stay.’
+
+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 him—let it be
+enough for us—that 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 more in every age, through all the
+fearful training needful for a fallen race.
+
+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
+self-defence, 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 common-sense arguments of self-interest, 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,
+witch-manias, 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 the end of the war desolations are determined.’
+
+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 drama—all the more fearful because none knows its purpose, its
+plot, which character will be assumed by any given actor, and, least of
+all, the _dénouement_ 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 whole-hearted, 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.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{219}  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 Son, West Strand.  2 vols.  1856.
+
+{246}  This article appeared in the _North British Review_.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND***
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