The Reign of Henry the Eighth | Page 7

suppressed. He made war with France; he
invaded Scotland more than once, and every time with striking success.
He played his vigorous part in European politics, and at his death he
left his realm inviolate. It is an amazing record, which might well
dazzle a writer of Froude's temperament and training. But there are
dark shades in the picture, which Froude was content to make little of,
if not to ignore. He is fond of contrasting Henry's way with

conspirators with that of his daughter Elizabeth. He sneers at her
"tenderness" towards high-born traitors, and never ceases to reproach
her with her one act of repression after the Yorkshire rising. But he had
not a word to say against the tyrannical murders of Henry VIII.
Elizabeth truly boasted that she never punished opinion: Henry sent to
the scaffold better men than himself for holding academical opinions
contrary to his own. Cardinal Fisher may have been--after the
publication of Chappuys's letters it is not possible to deny that he
was--technically guilty of treason. But he was a saint and an old man
past eighty, and "the earth on the edge of the grave was already
crumbling under his feet." The king spared neither age nor worth nor
innocence. He had been the familiar friend of More; he had walked
through his gardens at Chelsea leaning on his arm; More had been his
chancellor; he was still the greatest of his subjects; while frankly
admitting that he differed in opinion from the king on the question of
the royal supremacy, he promised that he would not try to influence
others. Henry was inexorable. He not only condemned him to die a
traitor's death,--he added a callous message, which still rouses the
indignation of every generous soul, that he should "not use many words
on the scaffold." Thomas Cromwell had served him as few ministers
have served a king; to him was due--or, at least, he was the capable
instrument of--the policy which has given distinction to Henry's reign;
but he was delivered over to his enemies when the king's caprice had
shifted to another quarter. Even Froude finds it difficult to excuse the
execution of More and Cromwell. But, having once made up his mind
to make a hero of Henry, he goes on with it bravely to the end. He
hides nothing, he excuses nothing, he extenuates nothing. Neither the
death of the aged Countess of Salisbury or of the gallant Earl of Surrey,
nor the illegal imprisonment of the aged Norfolk, the hero of Flodden,
shakes his faith in his hero-king. He even relates, with minute detail,
how a few days before the king's death, four poor persons, one of
whom was a tailor, were burnt at the stake for denying the Real
Presence. But his final comment on it all was: "His personal faults were
great, and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far
deeper blemishes would be but scars upon the features of a sovereign
who in trying times sustained nobly the honour of the English name,
and carried the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its

history."
When a young man Froude had been elected Fellow of Exeter College,
Oxford. This entailed his taking holy orders, though he does not seem
to have regularly performed the duties of a clergyman. In 1849 he
published his first book, The Nemesis of Faith, now happily forgotten.
It raised an immediate commotion. It was denounced as heretical, and
the senior tutor of Exeter burnt it during a lecture in the College Hall.
Froude resigned his Fellowship, and his connection with the university
was severed for thirty-three years. He was one of the first to take
advantage of the alteration of the law which enabled a clergyman to
resign his orders. In 1892 he went back to Oxford as Regius Professor
of Modern History. "The temptation of going back to Oxford in a
respectable way," he said, "was too much for me." He died on October
20, 1894, and on his tombstone he is simply described, by his own wish,
as Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford.
The writer is indebted for information with regard to Froude's life to Mr.
Pollard's article in the Dictionary of National Biography, and to Mr.
Herbert Paul's admirable Life of Froude (Pitman).
W. LLEWELYN WILLIAMS.
November 16, 1908.
The following is a list of the published works of J.A. Froude:
Life of St. Neot (Lives of the English Saints, edited by J.H. Newman),
1844; Shadows of the Clouds (Tales), by Zeta (_pseud._), 1847; A
Sermon (on 2 Cor. vii. 10) preached at St. Mary's Church on the Death
of the Rev. George May Coleridge, 1847; Article on Spinoza (_Oxford
and Cambridge Review_), 1847; The Nemesis of Faith (Tale),