The Reign of Henry the Eighth | Page 2

was
Thomas à Becket. He wrote a sketch of his life and career, which he did
not live to finish. His friends ill-advisedly published it after his death.
His ideal ecclesiastical statesman of modern times was Archbishop
Laud. Charles I. was a martyr, and the Revolution of 1688 an
inglorious blunder. To the day of his death--in spite of the harsh
discipline which he received at his hands in boyhood, in spite of wide
divergence of opinion in later years in all matters secular and
religious--Froude never ceased to worship at his brother's shrine. Out of
regard for his memory, more than from any passionate personal
conviction, he associated himself while at Oxford with the Anglican
movement. His affectionate admiration for Newman, neither time nor
change served to impair. If Carlyle was his prophet in later years, his
influence happily did not affect his style. That was based on the chaste
model of Newman. He owed his early friendship with Newman to that

great man's association with Hurrell Froude. Many years after, when
Freeman had venomously accused him of "dealing stabs in the dark at a
brother's almost forgotten fame"--poor Froude's offence was that he
dared to write an essay on Thomas à Becket--he defended himself with
rare emotion against the charge. "I look back upon my brother," he said,
"as on the whole the most remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I
have never seen any person--not one--in whom, as I now think him, the
excellences of intellect and character were combined in fuller
measure."
As Froude's powers developed and matured, and as his experience of
the world broadened, he cast away his brother's yoke, and reverted
more to his father's school of thought. As his father was to him the
ideal clergyman of the Church of England, so the Church before 1828
remained to him the model of what an established religion should be.
He was a thorough Erastian, who believed in the subordination of the
Church to the state. He detested theological doctrinalism of all kinds;
he revolted against the idea that the clergy should form a separate order.
The pretensions of Whitgift and Laud, the High Anglican school of
Keble and Pusey, the whole conception of the Church and the
priesthood which underlay the Oxford Movement, were things
obnoxious to him. In a characteristic passage in the chapter on the
Massacre of St. Bartholomew he reveals his hatred and distrust of
dogmatism. "Whenever the doctrinal aspect of Christianity has been
prominent above the practical," he wrote, "whenever the first duty of
the believer has been held to consist in holding particular opinions on
the functions and nature of his Master, and only the second in obeying
his Master's commands, then always, with a uniformity more
remarkable than is obtained in any other historical phenomena, there
have followed dissension, animosity, and in later ages bloodshed.
Christianity, as a principle of life, has been the most powerful check
upon the passions of mankind. Christianity as a speculative system of
opinion has converted them into monsters of cruelty."
Holding such decided views on doctrinalism, it might have been
thought that Froude would have visited all the warring sects of the
sixteenth century with equal judgment. No Church was more doctrinal
than that of Geneva; no Calvinist ever was more dogmatic than John
Knox. But the men who fought the battle of the Reformation in

England and Scotland were, in the main, the Calvinists; and to Froude
the Reformation was the beginning of a new and better era, when the
yoke of the priest had been finally cast away. "Calvinism," he said in
one of his addresses at St. Andrews, "was the spirit which rises in
revolt against untruth." John Knox was too heroic a figure not to rouse
the artistic sense in Froude. "There lies one," said the Regent Morton
over his coffin, "who never feared the face of mortal man." Froude has
made this epitaph the text of the noblest eulogy ever delivered on Knox.
"No grander figure can be found, in the entire history of the
Reformation in this island, than that of Knox." He surpassed Cromwell
and Burghley in integrity of purpose and in purity of methods. He
towered above the Regent Murray in intellect, and he worked on a
larger scale than Latimer. "His was the voice that taught the peasant of
the Lothians that he was a free man, the equal in the sight of God with
the proudest peer or prelate that had trampled on his forefathers. He
was the one antagonist whom Mary Stuart could not soften nor
Maitland deceive. He it was who had raised the poor commons of his
country into a stern and rugged people, who might be hard, narrow,
superstitious, and fanatical, but who nevertheless were men