The Reign of Henry the Eighth | Page 6

trace is discoverable
in Froude's easy and effortless narrative. When he was approaching the
completion of his History, he vowed that his account of the Armada
should be as interesting as a novel. He succeeded not only with that

portion of his task, but with all the stirring story that he set out to
narrate. But the ease of his style only concealed the real pains which he
had taken. Of Freeman's charge Froude has long been honourably
acquitted. The Simancas MSS. have since been published in the Rolls
Series, and Mr. Martin Hume, in his Introduction, has paid his tribute to
the care, accuracy, and good faith of their first transcriber. Long before
this testimony could be given, Scottish historians who disagreed with
Froude's conclusions on many points,--men such as Skelton and
Burton--had been profoundly impressed with the care, skill, and
conscientiousness with which Froude handled the mass of tangled
materials relating to the history of Scotland.
This does not mean that Froude is free from minor inaccuracies, or that
he is innocent of graver faults which flowed from his abundant quality
of imagination. He constantly quotes a sentence inaccurately in his text,
while it is accurately transcribed in a footnote. He is careless in matters
which are important to students of Debrett, as for instance, he
indiscriminately describes Lord Howard as Lord William Howard and
Lord Howard. But Froude was sometimes guilty of something worse
than these trivial "howlers." Lecky exposed, with calm ruthlessness,
some of Froude's exaggerations--to call them by no worse name--in his
Story of the English in Ireland. When his Erasmus was translated into
Dutch, the countrymen of Erasmus accused him of constant, if not
deliberate, inaccuracy. Lord Carnarvon once sent Froude to South
Africa as an informal special commissioner. When he returned to this
country he wrote an article on the South African problem in the
Quarterly Review. Sir Bartle Frere, who knew South Africa as few men
did, said of it that it was an "essay in which for whole pages a truth
expressed in brilliant epigrams alternates with mistakes or
misstatements which would scarcely be pardoned in a special war
correspondent hurriedly writing against time." So dangerous is the
quality of imagination in a writer!
Truth to tell, Froude was a literary man with a fondness for historical
investigation, and an artist's passion for the dramatic in life and story.
He wrote with a purpose--that purpose being to defend the English
Reformation against the attacks of the neo-Catholic-Anglicans, under
whose influence he had himself been for a time in his youth. To him,
therefore, Henry VIII. was "the majestic lord who broke the bonds of

Rome." This is not the occasion, nor is the present writer the man, to
analyse that complex and masterful personality. Froude started to
defend the English Reformation against the vile charge that it was the
outcome of kingly lust. That charge he has finally dispelled. Henry VIII.
was not the monster that Lingard painted. He beheaded two queens, but
few will be found to assert to-day that either Anne Boleyn or Catherine
Howard were innocent martyrs. People must agree to differ to the crack
of doom as to the justice of Catherine's divorce. It is one of those
questions which different men will continue to answer in different ways.
But one thing is abundantly clear. If Henry was actuated merely by
passion for Anne Boleyn, he would scarcely have waited for years
before putting Queen Catherine away. Henry divorced Anne of Cleves,
but Anne, who survived the dissolution of her marriage and remained
in England for twenty years, made no complaint of her treatment, and
she has had no champions either among Catholic or Protestant writers.
Her divorce is only remembered as the occasion of the downfall of the
greatest statesman of his age, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. But in
his eagerness to proclaim the truth, Froude went on to defend a paradox.
Once free from the charge of lust,--and compared with Francis of
France or Charles V., Henry was a continent man--Henry became to
Froude the ideal monarch.
Some one has said that Henry VIII. was the greatest king that ever lived,
because he always got his own way. If that be the test, then Henry was
indeed "every inch a king." He broke with Rome; he deposed the Pope
from his supremacy over England; he dissolved the monasteries; he
sent the noblest and wisest in England to the scaffold; he reduced
Wales to law and order and gave her a constitution; he married and
unmarried as he liked; he disposed of the succession to the throne of
England by his will; and his people never murmured. Only once, when
the Pilgrimage of Grace broke out, was his throne in any danger, and
that insurrection he easily