BOOKS.

FROUDVS HISTORY OF ENGLAND.* AMONG the historians of our day, Mr. Froude occupies a peculiar position. He has research, conscience' learning, and talent of an unusually high order. He is original in his views; he is pains- taking ; be is sympathetic and imaginative. His composition is peculiarly his own ; his style almost defies imitation ; his senti- ment is characteristically noble ; and his thoughts in general are wise, appropriate and natural. If his prose has not the rush and glow of Lord Macaulay's:ivivid periods ; if he cannot command the emphatic rhetoric of Mr. Thomas Carlyle ; he yet tells his story with a simple earnest grace, a plain beauty, and an un- affected ease that are entirely his own. An occasional diffuseness, or want of concentration, is sometimes apparent; arising mainly, perhaps from an excess of documentary matter, introduced into the text, instead of being relegated, as we should prefer, to an appendix.

In the earlier portion of his projected work, Mr. Froude under- took to rehabilitate the character of King Henry VIII. of famous memory. He is not generally thought to have succeeded in his enterprise. His critics complain, and we think not without rea- son, that he has hardly made out his case. The world refuses to believe that the wife-divorcing and wife-killing monarch was simply the victim of conjugal infelicities. Mr. Froude's a priori method here meets with no favour. As little does the critical pub- lic seem inclined to accept his view of the condition of the lower classes, or endorse his estimate of the economical legislation under the Tudor king. Men find it impossible to believe in the effec- tiveness of this patriarchal supervision. They will not admit that a statute which professed to secure to every active labourer in England a sum equivalent to twenty shillings of our money, could really have been operative. They cannot recognize the existence of this Saturnian reign of plenty in a period when no fewer than seventy-two thousand persons were executed for theft and robbery. They point to the debasement of the silver coin ; to the omission of the enactment of any law to redress the wrongs of the labourer who received less than his stipulated wages ; they adduce evi- dence to show the subserviency of the House of Commons ; and they maintain, in their turn, that overpowered and corrupted by a despotic terror, Court and Parliament alike were predisposed to admit the guilt of those against whom any treasonable accusation was alleged.

Convinced of Mr. Froude's honest advocacy of his seemingly paradoxical opinion' we feel the force of these and similar re- joinders too acutely to rest satisfied with his theoretical vindica- tion of the character or policy of that "beloved sovereign," the Eighth Harry. On the other hand, we think that Mr. Froude has done valuable service in correcting the balance of popular prepossession which would make his hero a mere vulgar, brainless, anti-uxorious monarch. If he was king Bluebeard, he was not king Bluebeard only. We forget our Flume, if while we contend that his tyranny and barbarity exclude him from the title of a good prince, we deny that be merits in some degree the appellation of a great prince ; that he was courageous, intrepid, vigilant, sa- gacious; open, gallant and liberal, and not without elements of magnanimity. In Henry's favour and for Mr. Froude's partial sup- port, we may mention here that Leopold Ranke in his Englische G-eschichte, applauds Henry for his strong practical intelligence, his strenuous activity in the promotion of the general interests ; that he even attaches some value to the religious scruples of the king about his union with Catharine—a union which, as Mr. Froude reminds us, English law in our day would condemn as incestuous ; that he considers his anxiety to secure the succession meritorious ; and that he regards Henry as the continuator of the work which his father had commenced, extending to the spiritual province that national emancipation from foreign influence, which the first Tudor monarch had inaugurated, in the secular domain. But, whatever be the merits or demerits of Mr. Froude's theory, it will not be found to affect, in any appreciable degree, the con- clusions at which he arrives, in the new volumes of his History. We are inclined, indeed, to predict that these volumes will be welcomed alike by the critical and uncritical public, with unusual cordiality. The narrative which they embody is remarkable for its generally impartial character. The pathos the humanity, the lofty beauty, the quiet charm, and true and exalted wisdom which mark many of their pages, will induce admiring readers tc; linger spell-bound over them, or turn to them again and yet

again. The historical period which they comprise consists of the twelve years which elapsed between the death of Henry VIII., and that of the hapless Mary. It will be remembered that the great Tudor monarch confided the Government of the country, during Edward's minority, to sixteen executors, none of whom was entrusted with supreme power. Hertford, however, better known perhaps as Duke of Somerset, contrived, with the assistance of Sir William Paget, to secure to himself the precedency. The Protector, for so was he now called, was not a successful ruler. He alienated Scotland by an invasion which was intended to compel the marriage of Mary with the young king. He exhausted the public revenues ; he trifled away the Imperial alliance. He imperilled the French

• Ristary of England from the Fall of Trolsey to the Death of .Elizabeth. By

James Anthony Froude, M.A., late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Volumes V. and VI. Published by John W. Parker.

conquests. A rebellion at home, suppressed with a loss of ten thousand lives, and the menace of a formal war with France, were among the results of his administration. Mr. Froude, in- deed, thinks that the blame was not wholly his. Yet he shows that Somerset had violated the conditions on which he held his deputed authority ; and affirms that his colleagues were justified in calling him to account. "His intentions had been good, but there were so many of them that he was betrayed by their very number. fle had attempted the work of a giant:wM the strength of a woman, and in his failures he was passionate

• and unmanageable." Passing over the invasion of Scotland, when was fought the great battle- of Pinkie Cleugh, so graphically deseribed by Mr. Fronde, we shall advert to the trial and execution of the Pro- tector's brother, Lord Seymour of Sudleye. This violent and ambitions man had made a party against the Duke ; had con- nected himself with the Channel Pirates ; and was to all appear- ance involved in some conspiracy in which Sharington, who had put in circulation a hundred thousand pounds in base coin, largely participated. Seymour was accused and commenced his reply : but, when the more serious charges were pressed against him, gave up his defence. Somerset had endeavoured to overcome the admiral's jealousy by kindness. He would have interfered, but the Council prevented an interview. Seymour "employed his last days in writing to Elizabeth and Mary, urging them to con- spire against his brother." He died without flinching, for cowardice was not among his faults. Mr. Fronde seems to agree with Latimer that "he was a wicked man, and the realm was well rid of him."

Somerset's own end was not far distant. But first came the popular insurrection, in the north, in the south, in the east, and the west. It was preceded by universal peculation. "From the royal palace," says Mr. Froude, "to the police-stations on the Tweed, all classes of persons in public employment were contend- ing with each other in the race of plunder and extravagance." The change of culture, which substituted one shepherd for ten ploughmen ; the famine prices which followed ; the illegal enclo- sures' procedure, and the general want and misery led to those initial demonstrations on the part of the people which Somerset said openly that he liked well. It was now the time of the issue of the first Prayer-Book. It was to come into use at Whitsun- tide, and the Mass was to be put down and prohibited by law. The insurrection broke out in the West of England. There it wore a religious character. Wild doings were there in Cornwall and Devonshire. The "barns of Crediton " became a gathering word and a flaming beacon of insurrection ; the peasants of Devon fell "in the summer gloaming like stout-hearted valiant men fighting for their hearths and altars." In Oxford again, where the eucharistical controversies raged, was sad disorder. To give force to the arguments of Peter Martyr the rope was introduced, and far and wide among the villages, the bodies of the rectors and vicars were dangled from their church towers. In the Eastern counties, the insurrection wore another aspect. The people believing that the commonwealth was betrayed for the government of the few, determined to take the law into their own hands. Here, then, the rebellion was entirely social. The rising under Ket, the tanner of Wymondham ; the encampment on Mousehold Hill on the north of Norwich of sixteen thousand men with their turf huts roofed with boughs ; the administration of justice under the oak-tree, where the offending county gentle- men were brought up for trial, the fight, the defeat, and execu- tion, are vividly described by Mr. Froude in some admirable pages, which clearly exemplify the nature of this popular insur- rection. The fact is "Protestantism" had not succeeded, as how indeed should it ? Throughout the reign of Edward VI., the Reform movement fearfully degenerated. A corrupt government, venal courts of law ; an impurity to which the licentiousness of the Catholic clergy appeared like innocence ; the neglect of the commonest duties of probity and morality ; a destructive spirit of innovation ; an enforced speculative theology which excluded the action of a healthy, practical piety, were the apparent results of the religious movement. Mr. Fronde paints as with the poet's mystical pencil, dipped in the gloom of thunder and eclipse, the baseness of the great, the misery of the poor, the parvanernity of the wretched tyrannizing gospel professors of this ill-fated time. "The periodic sore of bankruptcy" was corroding the body pe- litical. The revenue still clung to: the hands by which it was collected. "Fines, confiscations, church plate, mint plunder, vanished like fairy gold." The rapacious Lords of the Council ap- propriated, since we "must not say stole," estates worth in modern currency, about five millions ; while the silver coin was debased again and again and the Government attempted to enforce violently an arbitrary system of prices. Genevan theology hsd supplanted the Lutheran ; and the tyranny of Protestantism hikd become intolerable. After Somerset's deposition from power, mat- ters grew even worse. The en-Protector, now more tolerant, took Mary's part against the Lords of the Council, and at last endea- voured "to regain his power from the hands by which it had been wrested from him." Before his plans, however, were matured, Somerset was betrayed by Sir Thomas Palmer. It seems im- possible to establish his guilt or to prove his innocence. If Fe may credit the testimony of Renard, the Emperor Charles' mins- ter, Warwick, or Northumberland, as he was shortly to be caged/ confessed before his own death, that the Duke of Somerset, !rad through his means, been falsely accused. The world at the time entertained no such uncertainty. Somerset was passionately

loved; and, when the headsman's arm had fallen, this victim of Northumberland's treachery, if such he was, was mourned and honoured by the English people. Northumberland inherited Ids rival's power, though without the title, which sanctioned its legitimate exercise. He succeeded in making himself almost absolute. Selfish, abibitious, and unscru- pulous; and clearly perceiving that the accession of the growingly popular Princess Mary would insure his own downfall, he deter- mined to change the succession, in contravention of the King's will and a parliamentary enactment. The disastrous consequences are too notorious to require elucidation. Cranmer was drawn into the rebellion; Lady Jane Grey, on whose fate and character Mr. Fronde has written some splendid sentences, in his own clear and lustrous style, became the Iphigenia of the faction. Protestant- ism had made many false steps. There needed only treason for its temporary defeat. It had already exhibited an "offensive combination of sacrilege and spoliation with a pedantry which could not bear the sound of the church bells and regarded an organ as impious ; " it had subjected the clergy to a compulsory subscription to the forty-two articles. Already the universal cor- ruption of public functionaries, the sufferings of the poor, the ruin of the currency and the embarrassment of the finances, reflected double discredit on the opinions of which these were considered the results. And now, when Northumberland raised the standard of rebellion, after the death of the poor boy-king, indignant and alienated England willingly rallied round the throne of a Catholic sovereign : "God save the Queen," says our historian rung from ten thousands of throats.

"The glad news spread like lightning through London, and the pent-up hearts of the citizens poured themselves out in a torrent of exultation. Above the human cries, the long silent church-bells clashed again into life : first, began St. Paul's, where happy chance had saved them from destruc- tion; then one by one every peal which had been spared caught up the sound ; and through the summer evening and the summer night, and all the next day, the metal tongues from tower and steeple gave voice to Eng- land's gladness. The Lords, surrounded by the chanting multitude, walked in state to St. Paul's, where the choir again sung a Te Deum, and the un- used organ rolled out once more its mighty volume of music. As they came out again at the close of the service, the apprentices were heaping piles of wood for bonfires at the crossways. The citizens were spreading tables in the streets, which their wives were loading with fattest capons and choicest 'wines; there was free feasting for all corners; and social jealousies, religious hatreds, were forgotten for the moment in the ectasy of the common delight. Even the retainers of the Dudleys in fear, or joy, tore their badges out of their caps, and trampled on them."

It was all over with Northumberland's dreams of ambition ; all over with the poor " Twelth day Queen," whose doom, however, was deferred for a time ; for Mary was so little cruel when she first came to the throne that she would have pardoned even the arch-rebel himself. But this could not be, and Northumberland, with Sir John Gates and Sir Thomas Palmer, suffered the death of traitors at Tower Hill. Apostates from the principles of the Reformation, which two of them openly disavowed in their death, they were occasions of triumph to the Catholic party, and instru- ments of the present failure of the Protestant cause, now weak- ened by unsuccessful treason, and apparently deserted by Heaven. England's reconciliation with Rome was now celebrated with pompous ceremonial in Whitehall, by the hysterical dreamer and melodramatic prelate, Reginald Pole. Then came the Spanish marriage, with its glittering vision of a messianic child ; then followed the waking dream; and Mary, the loving adoring wife, knew herself childless and husbandless, a blighted and a dying woman. Mr. Froude speaks very touchingly, and, we think truly, of this thrice-pitiable Queen. He does not consider her principally responsible for the baleful fires that lit up the Smith- field Golgotha, and expiated, by the death of noble men, the crimes of a loathly and putrescent Protestantism. His portraits of Mary, of Pole, of Renard, of Latimer, Hooper, Philip, Cran- mer, and many others, all testify to Froude's admirable de- scriptive talents. It is not alone his graphic power which we admire, but his lucid presentments of character, his penetrative perception, his delicate touch ; the pathos and the charm of his verbal pictures. Generally speaking, too, we find ourselves in agreement with Mr. Fronde's moral verdicts. Thus, we think his estimate of Cranmer an accurate one, on the whole, far truer than that of the depredators of a man, who, if he sometimes was de-

ficient in courage, yet knew how to be deliberately and nobly brave. In evil days, when the Gospellers slunk away, Creamer refined to fly; in an hour of extreme peril, he had the hardihood ta vindicate the doctrines which he taught, and to challenge con- troversial opposition. Cranmer is held by our appreciating his- torian to have been, when he trusted to his own convictions, the true representative of tke feelings of the best among his country- men. While the Church of England remains, observes Mr. Fronde, the image of Cranmer will be seen reflected on the calm surface of the Liturgy ; the one admirable thing which the un- happy reign of Edward produced. To Crammer we owe those prayers, translations from the Breviary, that in their "silvery melody of language," and simplicity of spirit, "chime like church bells in the ears of the English child."

Yet even Cranmer, mild, wise, and tolerant for his age, was in one capital instance not before that age. Catholic and Pro- testant alike, in that evil time, taught that in the eyes of the Maker of the world, an error of belief is the greatest of crimes ; that while for all other sins there is forgiveness, a mistake in the intellectual intricacies of speculative opinion will be punished not with the brief agony of a painful death, but with tortures to which there shall be no end." Of this "superstition," we em- ploy Mr. Froude's own expression, the Marian persecution was

"a legitimate fruit." Calvin advised the ProtectorSacral? e rit; a letter addressed to him in 1548, to punish with the Anabaptist and Romanist reactionaries. "John Kiln"; shrewdest and one of the noblest Reformers, did not conceal his opinion that Gardiner, Bonner, and Cuthbert" Tunstal, might have been justly put to death for nonconformity ; and Cranmer, assisted by Fox "the Martyrologist, produced the still-born volume, in which he claimed the continued privilege of sending obstinate heretics to the stake." Happily, the King, boy as he was, chanced to be practically more clear-sighted than the Arch- bishop of Canterbury himself, and the .Reformatio Legum of 1552, serves to attest only the theoretic acceptance by Protestants of the atrocious doctrine, inseparable from all supernatural dogma- tology, that "the discipline of the law must be extended from crimes against society to 'speculative' sins against God ; to erroneous opinions.

This tyranny of the controversial Evangelicalism of Edward's reign, helped largely to aid the reaction against Protestantism, and to accelerate its suppression. The work of the first Reformers had to be done again. When aristocratic brigandage, and gospel despotism, and murderous ambition, and treasonable insurrection, were duly expiated, the "illustrious cause " of national re- formation had once more its divine opportunities, its worthy champions, and its deserved triumphs.