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Tudor period was the injustice which I conceived to have been done by Lord Macaulay and others to the Fathers of the Reformed English Church, to Cranmer especially, the chief compiler of the Liturgy, and the author of some of the most beautiful parts of it. The very point of the first six volumes of my history was to show what unfair treatment Cranmer, Latimer, Hooper, and their companions in suffering had met with from modern writers. If I appeared as an apologist at all, it was as the apologist of Cranmer, whose character I conceived to require and deserve peculiarly tender consideration. Of the Church of England, so far as it has represented Cranmer's spirit, I have never written an unfavourable word—I have never entertained an unfavourable thought. I have regretted that this spirit was not more fully dominant. If it had been so, the worst misfortunes of the seventeenth century would have been avoided; and in my own opinion (the question here is of my personal sentiments) we should at the present day have been in a happier condition than we are. Mr. Freeman says I hate the Church of Tillotson as much as the Church of Laud. Mr. Freeman must have a singular power of insight into me. When have I ever spoken of Tillotson? If I had, it would have been to wish that all archbishops since the Reformation had resembled him. What I have disliked and dislike in old times or in modern, in Becket, and in Laud, and in the Ritualistic revival of our own time, has been the assumption by the clergy of a supernatural character and a supernatural authority. mysterious power transmitted by the imposition of hands existed of course, latent or expressed, from the second century to the sixteenth. But wise men did not build any large claims upon it. No more beautiful characters have been ever wrought out of human nature than those of some of the medieval Churchmen. I drew myself a sketch of one of these in my account of St. Hugh of Lincoln. But it was not by a St. Hugh that the claims of the sacerdotal order were most loudly insisted on. My review of the life of Becket was written to show that the Churchmen who gave prominence to the pretensions of sacerdotalism were not the best of their order, that the assertion of those pretensions was incompatible with the political safety of the country, and that it issued after Becket's death in the most extraordinary mass of lies which were ever palmed upon human credulity. It was against the assumption by the clergy of a power of working miracles that Europe revolted in the sixteenth century. The shadow of the supernatural character which was left by Elizabeth in the Church of England for political purposes was the active cause of the Puritan rebellion, of the deadness which followed on the reaction from that rebellion, of the growth of modern Dissent, of the exclusion from the Establishment of so much that is most earnest and beautiful in the religious mind of this country, and of the spiritual separation between England and Scotland. From the same cause have arisen the decay of

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Evangelicalism in the Church of England itself and the growth to its present dimensions of the Oxford movement of 1833. That movement has called out energy-energy enough, I dare say, but whether energy in a right direction has yet to be seen. To me it appears that when a vessel is growing unseaworthy the right method is to probe the weak places and replace them with sound timber, and that to paint and varnish and gild will not answer. I regret the revival of what are called Church principles, because they are based on the assumption of what has no truth in it; and when men take up with falsehood, bad consequences are sure to follow. If Mr. Freeman likes to call this fanatical hatred, he may choose his own expressions. The emotion which he thus describes is no more than a conviction that unreality has never worked for good in this world, and never will.

A more unfair, a more unjustifiable sentence was never written by Mr. Freeman than this illustration of his mode of dealing with me, unless perhaps I except the words with which he goes on.

It is, I should guess, a degree of hatred, which must be peculiar to those who have entered her ministry and forsaken it.

Hatred, I entirely agree with Mr. Freeman, is the worst of human passions. Mr. Freeman must be presumed to be incapable of such a passion, or I might have inferred that he had written this passage under the influence of it. I entered Deacon's orders in 1845. To take orders was at that time a condition for the tenure of a fellowship. I found myself unfitted for a clergyman's position, and I abandoned it. I did not leave the Church. I withdrew into the position of a lay member, in which I have ever since remained. I gave up my Fellowship, and I gave up my profession with the loss of my existing means of maintenance and with the sacrifice of my future prospects. Had I been 'the false prophet' which Mr. Freeman elsewhere politely terms me— had I been as indifferent to truth, as forgetful of the obligations of honesty, as he tells his readers that I am—is it likely that I should have left a beaten highway of life on which the going forward is so easy and so assured? Is it likely that I should have selected instead to make my way across country on the back of literature, where, besides the natural difficulties, the anonymous reviewer is waiting to trip the unhappy rider at every fence, or clamours at him as a fool like the enchanted stones on the mountain in the Arabian Nights?

Is it a reproach to leave at such hazards a profession for which a man finds himself unqualified? Would it not be an incomparably greater reproach to have yielded to the temptation and remained in it? Is it not enough that the existing prejudice on this subject bars a man's way to every regular employment which he might have looked for otherwise? Is it fair, is it tolerable, that Mr. Freeman and the Saturday Reviewer should avail themselves of that prejudice to point

to my Deacon's orders as if they were an ink-blot and a mark of shame? Literary criticism does indifferent credit to itself when it condescends to these unworthy expedients.

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'Justice,' Mr. Freeman continues, will never be done to the mediæval Church either by fanatical votaries or fanatical enemies. Mr. Froude has tried both characters, and both characters are incompatible with justice, incompatible with truth.' Mr. Freeman, I suppose, would claim for himself the merit of impartiality. I quote this passage merely as an instance of his carelessness of statement. Of the 'fanatical enemy' part of the matter I have said enough. But when was I a 'fanatical votary' of the medieval Church? He alludes perhaps to a Life of St. Neot which I wrote thirty-six years ago. I can think of nothing else which could have suggested such a notion to him. Did Mr. Freeman ever read that Life? Is there any trace of fanaticism in it? I wrote an account of St. Neot at the request of a person for whom I had a profound personal admiration, but he would smile at the supposition that I was fanatical or capable of fanaticism. In my reading on that occasion, and in my subsequent hagiological studies, I found myself in an atmosphere where any story seemed to pass as true that was edifying. I did not like my occupation, and drew out of it.

Mr. Freeman continues that I have made more than one 'raid' into the history of times earlier than those with which I deal in my chief work. The things sketched,' he says,'' have, for the most part, no existence save in Mr. Froude's imagination.' Mr. Freeman is hard to please. One moment he blames me for not having attended to earlier times. The next he blames me for making 'raids' into them. The word 'raid' seems to imply that particular periods are the reserved property of particular persons, who claim to have specially attended to them. It will be an unfortunate day for literature when a monopoly of this kind is allowed, or when the self-constituted owners are permitted to treat as trespassers those who wish to look into such periods for themselves. I was not aware that my imagination was so powerful as Mr. Freeman declares it to be; I can myself make no answer to so sweeping and all-comprehensive an assertion. The authorities with which I have dealt in these brief raids are easily accessible and not very numerous; my own sketches are easily accessible also. I can wish for nothing better than that the reader will be pleased to compare them, and will then reconsider the language in which Mr. Freeman speaks of what I have written.

'An inborn incurable twist,' he says, 'makes it impossible for Mr. Froude to make an accurate statement about any matter. By some destiny which he cannot escape, instead of the narrative which he finds he invariably substitutes another story out of his own head.' Again I must ask the reader to look for himself. It is true that I substi

tute a story in English for a story in Latin, a short story for a long one, and a story in a popular form for a story in a scholastic one. But these differences appeared to me to rise from the nature of the case. Mr. Freeman goes on: The law which compels Mr. Froude to tell his story in a different way from his authority is best illustrated by those instances which are of no controversial and little historical importance. Come what may, Mr. Froude's story must not be the story of the book.' The example given is the uncorrected misprint of Fitzwilliam for Fitzwalter. I do not excuse my oversight, but there are degrees of culpability and degrees in the inferences which may be legitimately drawn.

But Mr. Freeman suggests grave doubts as to my capacity as a translator.

'Nor can it be supposed,' he says, 'that Mr. Froude can really believe that "prædictæ rationes" means shortened rations.'

Mr. Freeman cannot suppose that I really believe it, but he evidently means that I seem to believe it; and he is so anxious that his readers shall share his discovery with him, that he returns a second time to it in these articles as a point which he has made good. I am grateful to Mr. Freeman for having provided me with so excellent a specimen of his general method of criticism. At a time of famine, when it may fairly be presumed that the monks of St. Albans were on short commons like other people, the abbot, a good and charitable person, sacrificed part of the abbey plate to feed the poor. The monks were angry. They complained that the Church property ought not to be alienated. They mutinied, and were so violent that the abbot had to call in the secular arm to put them down. Hæc inquam,' says the chronicler, 'quia tunc temporis prædictæ rationes in conventu magnam discordiam suscitârunt.' "I mention these things because at that time the aforesaid discussions occasioned great discord in the society.' The monks had been so furious, and complaints about their food were so frequent in the abbey, that I have no doubt myself that 'shortened rations' had to do with their irritation, and with this impression I told the story in my Annals of an English Abbey. It was open to Mr. Freeman to say that there was no proof that the monks were put on short commons, or that if they were it was the ground of their discontent with the abbot's charities. But this was not enough for him. He chooses to imply that because he finds 'prædictæ rationes' in the Latin account, and shortened rations' in my English one, I translated 'prædicta' into 'shortened,' and 'rationes' into 'rations.' He did not really think so, but he saw a certain resemblance between rationes' and 'rations' which the

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public would catch at, and he used it to raise a laugh at my expense. On the next point I have a grave charge to bring against Mr. Freeman. 'Now. all this,' he says, 'opens a very serious question

with regard to Mr. Froude's earlier writings. In those writings Mr. Froude's narrative constantly depends on authorities which very few of us can examine. Very few of us can test references at Simancas. It is not every one who can at a moment's notice test references to MSS. much nearer home.'

I have quoted only these words, but Mr. Freeman dilates further on his suspicions, and evidently wishes to convey them to his readers. Now with regard to the Simancas papers, I had myself felt it so important that the public should have access for themselves to such parts of the Spanish correspondence as I had brought away with me in transcript, that I deposited my whole collection, a very considerable one, in the British Museum, and I gave notice that I had done so when I published the last volumes of the History. Time being of importance to me, I had made my copies rapidly, and, to avoid expense, I had made most of them myself. My handwriting not being easily legible to others, I. suggested, when Mr. Panizzi took charge of them, that the more valuable letters should be recopied. Mr. Panizzi, on looking through my portfolios, considered that this would not be necessary, and that it would be more satisfactory if the papers were preserved precisely in the form in which I had used them. In the Museum, therefore, these documents have lain for nearly ten years accessible to every one, and it was scarcely ingenuous on Mr. Freeman's part to say 'very few of us can test references at Simancas.' But I must remind him—he can hardly have forgotten it-of something which happened nine years ago, when he himself or another person raised the same question in similar language in the Saturday Review. I felt very keenly the imputation which was made upon me, and I felt that there was but one way of meeting it. I placed myself in the hands of the late Sir Thomas Hardy, the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Records. I offered, in a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette, to submit my treatment of my unprinted authorities to the judgment of any competent persons whom Sir Thomas Hardy might select. In London and other places in England, in Paris, in Simancas, and in Vienna, I had read something like a hundred thousand manuscript letters and documents in English, French, Latin, Spanish, and Italian. I proposed that Sir Thomas Hardy should institute an examination into any part of my History of England which the Reviewer would point out, and I said that I would myself pay the expense of the inquiry, provided the Saturday Review would publish the report. I confess that, when I thought of the work which I had gone through and the nature of it, I was alarmed at the prospect. I believe anybody would have been alarmed. I knew that I must have made mistakes. The most accomplished experts will now and then make blunders. I remember an occasion when the united efforts of all the clerks in the Simancas Library were required to make out for me a single letter of Philip the

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