Froudes History of England | Page 4

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