Second. If the report proved unfavourable, though my good faith might not have been impugned, my credit as a writer would be gone. Still, severe as the ordeal was, I was ready to face it. A contemptuous refusal was my answer from the editor of the Saturday Review. Mr. Freeman, who has paid so much attention to the relations between myself and that Review, is not likely to have overlooked this part of the story; and I venture to ask whether it is open to him now to repeat the same insinuation without a single word of reference to it, and without, so far as can be seen, having looked himself at the Spanish MSS. to which he specially refers, though copies of them lay within his reach in the Museum.

But Mr. Freeman has not yet done with my 'raids.'

'Mr. Froude,' he says, 'first dealt with the life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, professing to found his story on the Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis.' This means that I have not done what I professed to do When my sketch of the Life of St. Hugh' first appeared in Fraser's Magazine, the Saturday Review accused me of having made every blunder into which it was possible for me to fall, and again raised the same question whether, if I was so incapable of dealing fairly with a single authority, it was possible to trust me when I had to examine and compare many. Before I republished this small biography, I went through it with the light of my Reviewer's criticisms. Notwithstanding this assistance, I could recognise but two errors, and those of an utterly trifling character. I must again ask the reader to compare it with the Magna Vita, remembering however that I was not translating from it, but borrowing my materials from it. I will only beg him, if he finds 'prædictæ rationes' anywhere in the Latin and 'shortened rations' anywhere in the English, not to suppose that one is intended for the other.

He

He

Of the Annals of an English Abbey Mr. Freeman says: 'Mr. Froude's Annals are Annals of his own devising.' He refers for proof to a recent examination in one of the weekly journals-I presume the Saturday Review again. I have not read that examination. The prædictæ rationes' I suppose to be a specimen from it. By such methods anything can be made out of anything. Mr. Freeman detects, or thinks he detects, some small speck or mote. places it under a lens which magnifies to a thousand diameters. makes a drawing of the shape in which it then appears to him, frames it in innuendos and invectives, and produces it before his readers as an instance of abuse of authorities, with nothing to indicate the real diminutiveness of the object which he desires them to observe. Let the lens be taken away, let the story be read with the different incidents in their natural proportions, and to my eyes Mr. Freeman's stupendous errors often become wholly invisible. He has himself a keener power of perception.

But he can invent where perception fails him. He says: As an

instance of Mr. Froude's singular indifference to accuracy in local matters, it is plain that he wrote nearly the whole of his St. Albans narrative in the belief that the abbey church lately raised to cathedral rank was a ruin like Rievaux or Tintern.' Mr. Freeman says I cannot write accurately. What am I to think of Mr. Freeman? In the very sketch with which he is finding fault he had these words under his eyes: In the general ruin the Church of St. Albans was saved by the burgesses. On the passing of the Act of Suppression they purchased the buildings, and part of the church has been used since the Reformation for the Protestant service.' I may add that The Annals of an English Abbey appeared first in parts in a magazine. As an evidence of my indifference in local matters, and of my belief that the church was in ruins, I had a drawing made of the church as it then stood, which was prefixed to the opening chapter.

These instances of unfairness, of false statement, of exaggeration, perversion, misrepresentation, and the other accusations which Mr. Freeman alleges against myself, I have taken from the first nine pages of his review of my papers on Becket. The review itself extends to ninety-eight pages. The violence of the invective increases as it proceeds, and therefore it is safe to multiply them by ten, to find the whole number of similar passages which these four articles contain. But I must be just to Mr. Freeman. I have pointed out places where he has gone beyond his evidence. I will add one, in fairness to him, where I will confess that he has been signally triumphant, and has proved me guilty of real ignorance. It is the more proper that I should mention it, because his alter ego in the Saturday Review has brought it up so many times against me during the last nineteen years. Mr. Freeman himself has now playfully alluded to it once more. Often as my other faults have been repeated and dwelt upon, this one has been repeated the most often, as the greatest and most inexcusable. It is fit, therefore, that I should now confess, and the subject may be then perhaps let drop.

It had been asserted, and it is still asserted in books claiming authority, that in the reign of Henry the Eighth 72,000 persons fell in England by the hand of the executioner. I had myself heard this stated as a fact from a Professor's chair at Oxford, and of course had believed it. It might have been expected that cruelties so extensive would have left some traces of themselves in the public records. When I came to examine those records, I not only found no such evidence as I expected, but I found evidence which seemed to prove that the numbers must have been enormously exaggerated. Looking for the authority, I discovered it in a description of Britain' attached by another hand to Holinshed's history. The writer's authority was Jerome Cardan. Going to Cardan, I found a horoscope describing the combination of planets when Henry the Eighth was born, which had caused his career to be a bloody one; and Cardan gave as

an illustration that he had heard from the Bishop of Lexovia' that 72,000 persons &c. No hearsay story told by a Bishop of Lexovia, wherever Lexovia might be, was an adequate support for a statement of so much historical consequence. I was myself once told by an Irish bishop that two million poor people had died in the last famine besides those which had emigrated. It appeared to me that I had done some service in having traced such a legend to its source. The person of the Bishop of Lexovia' seemed to me so relatively unimportant, that I wrote the words down as I found them. The Saturday Reviewer discerned but too truly that I did not know Lexovia to be Lisieux. He has taken care that I shall remember it. For twenty years I have been reminded, at short intervals, of my ignorance. I am now reminded of it again. I have been taught a lesson, too, about the relative proportions of things. I had thought that the character of the evidence for the 72,000 executions was the point of greatest moment. The Reviewer has shown me that I was mistaken; for, often as he has told his readers that I was ignorant of the modern name of Lexovia, he has never hinted at the cause which led me to speak of Lexovia at all.

Here, therefore, Mr. Freeman has me at advantage. I have nothing to say. For the rest the instances which I have produced show that if I am to be accused of inaccuracy Mr. Freeman is not the person who is entitled to do it. It may be still said that I have left untouched the immediate question of the character of Becket. I have done so because I cannot extend my argument to an interminable length; because it is impossible to discuss minute points of a long story in a single article; and because I intend to meet Mr. Freeman's objections in the only form in which a satisfactory reply is possible. My papers on Becket were not written with a purpose of republication; but I shall republish them at my earliest leisure with such notes and references as may be necessary, and in these notes I shall mention such mistakes as I can acknowledge to have been made. If I have been in error on any matter of consequence, I shall not conceal it; but I have yet to learn that I have made any such errors.

There are three points, however, of general historical interest on which, if they can be disengaged from the irrelevancies and personalities in which Mr. Freeman has enveloped them, I must say a few words in vindication of myself. Mr. Freeman accuses me of having grossly misrepresented Becket's conduct

1. In attributing acts of unnecessary violence to him in his action as Chancellor.

2. In having given a false account of Becket's acceptance of the Archbishopric.

And he says further:—

3. That I have totally failed to understand the cause which prevented the prosecution of Becket's murderers.

These charges are really serious; and if Mr. Freeman has made out his case, I will allow that he has good reason for finding fault with me. They are the main counts of the indictment; the rest is vapour. I will take them separately.

1. Edward Grim was one of Becket's biographers, and the most devoted of his friends. In Grim's life of the Archbishop there is the following passage:

Sanctus Thomas ante cancellariam suam quam innocenter, quam sine querelâ priora tempora transegerit in imo positus, sermo superior explanavit. Nunc autem locatus in sublimi, quantæ audaciæ, quantæ fuerit presumptionis, difficile dictu. Quantis enim necem, quantis rerum omnium proscriptionem intulerit, quis enumeret ? Validâ namque stipatus militum manu civitates aggressus est; delevit urbes et oppida, villas et prædia absque miserationis intuitu voraci consumpsit incendio, et inimicis domini sui undecunque insurgerent intolerabilem se exhibebat.

Every one except Mr. Freeman will admit that in these words Grim was referring to proceedings on the part of the Chancellor on which his friends looked back with regret, and of which he himself could give no satisfactory explanation. It is no excuse to say that Becket was acting in the king's name and for the king's service. The same defence may be made for the Duke of Alva, or for Judge Jeffreys. There is nothing to show what Grim specially means. Mr. Freeman goes at great length into the suppression of the companies of free lances which were scattered about England in fortresses, and had been left as legacy to Henry the Second by the misgovernment of his predecessor. He explains the misery which these disorderly bands had occasioned, and he gives to Becket the credit of making an end of them.

Becket's advice may have gone along with that of the great council of the realm on which the king acted. But, unfortunately for Mr. Freeman's argument, Becket was not Chancellor till 1157; Henry succeeded to the throne in 1154; and Fitzstephen expressly says that these bands were broken up and their castles destroyed within three months of his coronation.

Miseratione Dei, consilio Cancellarii et cleri et baronum regni, qui pacis bonum volebant, intra tres primos menses coronationis regis Wilhelmus de Ipra violentus incubator Cantiæ cum lacrymis emigravit. Flandrenses omnes collectis impedimentis et armis ad mare tendunt. Castella omnia per Angliam corruunt, præter antiquas pacis conservandæ turres et oppida.3

In this passage the word 'cancellarius,' either cannot refer to Becket, or relates to him before his promotion. Grim therefore was not alluding to the demolition of the castles. To what then did he allude? He was perhaps thinking of the Welsh war; perhaps of the war of Toulouse; perhaps of the suppression of a revolt in Aquitaine which

2 Vita Sancti Thoma, Ed. Quin, c. 15.

3 Vita S. Thomæ, Fitzstephen, 0.

followed that war. I refrained from discussing a question unconnected with the matter which I had in hand. I passed it over with an indication of my own opinion that the occasion was the Aquitaine revolt.

The word 'proscription' would hardly have been used of conquests made in a foreign war, and the word 'insurgent' points to rebellion. All the details which we possess of Becket's performances as Chancellor belong, not to anything which he did in England, but to campaigns or negotiations on the continent. Mr. Freeman assumes characteristically that, in speaking of a revolt in Aquitaine, I was alluding awkwardly to the war of Toulouse itself, with which he considers me to have had but the vaguest acquaintance. Mr. Freeman does not like assumptions in others, and he ought to avoid them himself. I do not pretend to explain Grim's language with any certainty, but he was himself the archbishop's worst calumniator, or his words have no meaning at all, unless the Chancellorship of Becket was marked by acts as reprehensible and unscrupulous as I represented them to have been.

2. Mr. Freeman admits that Henry the Second promoted Becket to the archbishopric because he expected that Becket would prove as active and as useful to him in this new capacity as he had been before. The Constitutions of Clarendon were not the growth of any sudden resolution. The ecclesiastical disorders in the nation required to be dealt with as peremptorily as the secular. Becket was the confidential adviser of the king, and it is impossible to conceive that he was not acquainted with the views which the king entertained. It is equally incredible that Henry would have so earnestly pressed the elevation of a person whom he had any reason of suspecting of an intention to oppose and thwart him. Becket did not, could not have given the king notice of the course which he intended to pursue at any rate, with such distinctness as would have prevented Henry from deceiving himself; and either he ought to have informed the king of his intentions plainly, or he ought not to have accepted the Primacy. He did in fact hesitate, but his hesitation was overcome in a manner which I thus described

:

He did, as we are told, feel some scruples. The ecclesiastical conscience had not wholly destroyed the human conscience. The king had been a generous master to him. But his difficulties were set aside by the casuistries of a Roman legate. Archbishop Theobald died when the two cardinals were in Normandy for the marriage of Prince Henry and the Princess Margaret. There was a year of delay before the choice was finally made. Becket asked the advice of Cardinal Henry of Pisa. Cardinal Henry told him that it was for the interest of the Church that he should accept the archbishopric, and that he need not communicate convictions which would interfere with the appointment.

On this Mr. Freeman says: "The simple answer is, to say that the whole account is pure fiction.' This is a grave offence, if I have been guilty of it, and there is grave offence on Mr. Freeman's part