The Reign of Henry the Eighth | Page 4

was not without sympathy
with the old order of things. We cannot but feel a thrill as we read his
incomparable description of the change which was effected in men's
thoughts and ideas by the translation of the mediæval into the modern
world? "For, indeed, a change was coming upon the world, the meaning
and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era
to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old
things were passing away, and the faith and the life of ten centuries
were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the
castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms,
desires, beliefs, convictions, of the old world were passing away, never
to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The
floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back into an infinite abyss
of immeasurable space; and the firm earth itself, unfixed from its
foundations, was seen to be but a small atom in the awful vastness of
the universe. In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built
for themselves, mankind were to remain no longer. And now it is all
gone--like an unsubstantial pageant faded; and between us and the old
English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will
never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination
can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral,
only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some
faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they
were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar
creation of mediæval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a
vanished world." Froude was once asked what was the greatest and

most essential quality of an historian. He replied that it was imagination.
It was a true and a just saying, and Froude himself possessed the
faculty in abundance.
It was not only with the old order that Froude showed his sympathy. He
is seldom ungenerous in his references to individual Catholics, however
mistaken in his sight their opinions may have been. With Wolsey and
Warham, Fisher and More, even with Gardiner and Bonner he deals
fairly and with some amount of real sympathy. The heroic death of
Campian moves him to pity just as much as the death of Latimer; the
strenuous labours of Father Parsons to overthrow Elizabeth and
Protestantism failed to remove him beyond the pale of Froude's
charitable judgment. One English Catholic alone was reserved for the
historian's harsh and sometimes petulant criticism. For Cardinal Pole
Froude felt the angriest contempt. He was descended from the blood
royal, both of England and of Wales. On his father's side he was
descended in direct line from the ancient princes of Powis; on his
mother's from the Plantagenets and the Nevilles. He was the most
learned and illustrious Englishman of his age. He had stood high in
King Henry's favour; he was destined for the greatest offices in the
state. He was not without natural ambition. Yet he forfeited all that he
had--the favour of his prince, the society of his mother whom he loved,
and the kindred who were proud of him, the hope of promotion and of
power, his friends, his home, and his country, for conscience' sake. He
remained true to the ancient faith in which he was reared. With
unerring instinct he foresaw that, once England was severed from the
Papacy, it would be impossible for king or parliament to stem the flood
of the Reformation. For twenty years he remained an exile on the
continent. He returned an old and broken man, to witness the overthrow
of his cherished plans. He was repudiated by the Pope whose authority
he had sacrificed everything to maintain, and in his old age he suffered
the humiliation of being accused of heresy in the court of Rome. He
died the same day as Mary died, with the knowledge that all his life's
labours and sacrifices were come to naught, and that the dominion of
the Roman Church in England was gone for ever. Froude saw none of
the pathos or tragedy of Pole's life. To him the cardinal was a renegade,
a traitor to his country, a mercenary of the Pope, a foreign potentate, a
"hysterical dreamer," who vainly imagined that he was "the champion

of heaven, and the destroyer of heresy."
Froude was, above all, an Englishman. His strongest sympathies went
out to the "God's Englishmen" of Elizabeth's reign, who broke the
power of Rome and Spain, and who made England supreme in Europe.
In his first chapter he describes the