Froudes History of England | Page 9

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 praemunire, and therefore dare not appeal to Parliament to
carry out his designs, even if he could have counted on the Parliament's
assistance in any measures designed to invigorate the Church. At last
arises in the divorce question the accident which brings to an issue