Froudes History of England | Page 8

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