BOOKS.
FROUDE'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.* THE portion of the history of England which Mr. Fronde has chosen for reconsideration and restatement has been treated by writers who represent all sections of English political and reli- gious party, and various shades of individual opinion and senti- ment.. Between these writers there are of course wide differences both as to facts and judgments upon facts ; but on one point, so far as we can recall, they are singularly y unanimous Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant—Churchman, and Scep- tic—Tory, Whig, and Democrat—agree in regarding Henry the Eighth as a bad man and a tyrannical king, selfish, unfeel- ing., and relentless, an unjust judge, and a despotic ruler. And this judgment has been passed not in ignorance of the details of his reign from the vague reports of tradition, still less, in any case but that of Catholic historians, from disapproval of the gene- ral-tendency of the great public events which make that reign- the most important epoch in English history. We are not deal- ing here with a Tiberius portrayed by the annalists of a reaction, - under the rule of a family hostile So the fame of the race they had dispossessed, or by the prurient gossipmongers of a filthy aristocracy seeing everywhere only the dirt in which they revel- led. No revolution thrust the Tudors from the throne, no suc- cessful reaction reversed the policy of Henry_ the Eighth ; the age immediately succeeding his own was at once the most brilliant- and the purest age of our literature. A consensus of opinion as. to the _character of a king and of a reign under these circum- stances carries with it a vast weight of a priori authority, which nothing but the discovery of dOciaments heretofore unknown, or the conviction of our historians en masse of stupidity or blind prejudice, can overthrow. Yet this is the task which Mr. Fronde has undertaken, and in which he has attained sufficient success at: least..to cause a more than momentary revulsien of feeling and. oscillation of judgment.
Mr. Fronde is indeed in possession of numerous records of the. time hitherto unknown to historians, and. recently discovered and copied by Sir Francis Palgrave. But, so far as we can judge, these documents, though in many- cases interesting and important, de not materially alter the broad lines of the story as other his- torians knew it, and would not therefore have altered their ver- dict upon the character and conduct of Henry the Eighth, and upon the condition of the English nation under his government. The strength of Mr. Fronde s case rests not upon the discovery of new facts, but upon the degree of credence to be placed in one clime of facts rather than another, and upon the degree of prominence to be assigned to Motives of public policy in the conduct of Henry and his people, or to those more personal motives, whether dictated in the King by sensual passion and tyrannical temper, and in the people by slavish fear and regard for themselves, upon the re- spective influence of which much of any fair judgment upon the actions of men of past time must be based.
" To determine," says Mr.-Froude, "who are, and who are not, admissible as witnesses, is the chief_difficulty in stad.ying the his- tory of the Reformation." And the Reformation is in this respect like all stormy and changeful epochs in which man's passions and interests are deeply engaged on either side and the ordinary in- capacity for seeing and telling the exact truth is proportionately magnified. In this difficulty Mr. Fronde has followed the plan suggested in his well-known essay on the study of English His- tory, and has made the statutes and official records the solid framework Of his narrative. "I have," he says, "taken my story almost exclusively from contemporary letters, state papers, and acts of Parliament ; . . . and . . . it has seemed to me as if the history has written itself, and can be read off in its main out- lines without difficulty." (Preface, page 6.) So far as the public acts of the King and of the nation are concerned, no other source of information, that we can see' is to be relied on by any historian where this is accessible ; but, unfortunately, it is not so much about the acts as about their moral character that the dispute is parliaments of grand juries, to allege any but • hly honourable _ concerned ; and it is not the habit Of kings, of privy councils, of and subtilay politic reasons for their acts. o one has ever doubted that King Henry divorced Catherine of Arragon, married Anne Boleyn and beheaded her, tried and executed Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, and all the rest of the seta which are laid to his charge, by what is called due course Of law ; and that, whether these acts were right or wrong, mere ex- cesses of royal passion and caprice, or necessary results of the guilt of the victims and of a policy essential to the safety of the kingdoms, the great officers of state and the legislative and judi- • History of England from the Fall of IVolsey to the Death of Elisabeth. By .Tames Anthony Fronde, ht..A., late Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. rOlfillfelI. and II. Published by Parker and Son. dal bodies concurred in them, and are jointly responsible for them. The whole question is, in the first place, whether state policy as distinguished from the personal passions of the monarch led to these and similar acts, and justified them to the consciences of those concerned in them and of the sound part of the nation ; and, in the second place whether the King's Ministers, his Par- liaments, his Judges, and his Juries, enjoyed any sufficient inde- pendence, to give their concurrence in his acts any value as indi- cating their genuine sentiments on the matters _propounded to them, or those of the nation which they represent. Mr. Fronde has assumed the latter hypothesis ; and indeed his principal mo- tive in his work seems to be the generous desire of vindicating our ancestors from the disgrace of sanctioning acts which, as they are ordinarily represented, must have been shocking to the feel- ings and the consciences of a virtuous and high-minded nation. He finds the acts sanctioned; he refuses to admit the common hypothesis that the nation enjoyed no real liberty, but was under a despotism which allowed no opposition to the King's will ; he is therefore driven to the belief that state policy seemed to the men of that time a sufficient justification for the conduct which more recent times have set down to the account of passion and proffi-
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gacy the monarch and of subservience in his people.
Mr. Fronde has, We say, assumed the liberty of the subject, the independence of the legislative and judicial bodies, as the basis of his whole defence of Henry. For his argument runs thus. We find all the acts of the King's reign, on which the heaviest charges against him are based, supported and sanctioned by the consti- tutional authorities. We must therefore either suppose that these authorities had good reasons for what they did, or that they basely made themselves parges to the most heinous crimes. We further find certain reasons of state alleged in the decuments by which the authorities sanctioned these proceedings, reasons forti- fied with appeals to the most sacred names and feelings ; and we mint therefore further cenclude that these great bodies either be- lieved what they stated in the most solemn manner possible, or that in addition to being heinous criminals they were base and contemptible liars and cowards. And the men of whom we are asked to believe this were the prelates of the Reformed Church of England, among whom were Crannter and Latimer, the most amiable and the 'boldest of sincere Christians ; the nobility of Eng- land, the old chivalry of Crecy and Agincourt, the descendants of the bold Barons who wrung the Great Charter from a licentious tyrant, the fathers of the brilliant courtiers and soldiers of Eliza- beth and the Armada ; the representatives of the Commons, when wealth and enterprise were fast raising them to the fast position in the land, when every man was armed, and there was no stand- ing army, when learning and religion were advancing with giant strides. Thus put, One cannot wonder that Mr. Froude shrinks from accepting the common theory of Henry's reign, either in the form which assumes that such a nation would tamely follow a des- pot in his cruel and wayward crimes or that they had no power of helping themselves. For to one of these alternatives the com- mon theory inevitably leads. And yet there are facts which, with all our natural wish to feel proud of our ancestors, prevent us from at once assenting to Mr. Froude's solution of the difficulty, and aocepting as indisputable certainties that the English nation concurred in Henry's acts as the neoessary and therefore justi- fiable safeguards of public security, or that they possessed the practical power of resisting those acts had they deemed them un- justifiable. To take first the Lords Spiritual, and the body of clergy, regu- lar and secular, of which they were the leaders : it is evident that from the first opening of the questions which brought on the se- paration of the EnglishChurch from the Papacy, and afterwards the reformation of doctrine, they were utterly paralyzed as an in- dependent power in the realm. Struck down by the determined resolution of the Monarch to accomplish his divorce at all hazards to the connexion with the Pope—divided in Opinion among them- selves on the main question—fearing its remote consequences— driven one way by their ecclesiastical doctrines, another by their national sentiments end private interests—with no popular sym- pathy to fall batik upon in case of resistance—the Spiritual Lords succumbed hopelessly from the first as a body ; and, in spite of their enormous wealth, their traditional position and their con-
stitutional power, they appear in the subsequent position, as almost passive victims of a movement they can neither check nor lead. Had they possessed the same fiery zeal and the same obstinate bravery that distinguished so many of the inferior clergy, the English Reformation would have been a very nitteh more dificult struggle than it actually was. But these latter, depriyed of their natural leaders, were easily crushed in detail ; and so far as the spiritualty was concerned, no effectual resistance was ever displayed to Henry's absolute will,—though no one will be auda- cious enough to pretend that the Reformation,even in its earlier aspects, was to their liking as a body, or anything but in the last degree hateful and formidable to the majority among them. If nothing else were known of them but the easy compliance with which through the reigns of Henry,. Edward, and Mary, they changed their religion according to the shade of orthodoxy whie was the fashion at Court, we should not be inclined to place much reliance on an hypothesis which assumed among them a delicate conscience, a brave stand for duty, and the power to resist such changes as were repugnant to them. The Temporal Peers, too, were no more the Barons who had won Magna Charta by armed combination, than the Spiritual Peers were the same men who had made Nenry the Second do penance for the murder of their leader. The disastrous wars between the factions of York and Lancaster had utterly broken the power, as they had well nigh extinguished the families, of the ancient English aristocracy. Henry the Seventh had completed by the aid of subtle lawyers and subservient judges the degrade- hen of the order from feudal sovereignty to brilliant courtiership. The great nobles could no longer, safely defy in their strongholds by the aid of armed retainers the mandates of their King and the sentences of his Courts ; while by the side of such power and wealth as they still possessed was rapidly growing up a race of wealthy traders who were ousting them from their lands, who looked to the King and his law courts as a protection, and to whom the civil commotion due to the exorbitant power and pre- tensions of the feudal nobility was hateful and destructive. Then, too, the nobility itself—such of it as was left—was divided by the old feuds and the pretensions connected with them ; and, as with the spiriivalty so with the temporal aristocracy, the King could always count on the support of one great family against another— could always allure adherents to his cause and his acts by the temptations of dignity and plunder. It is. needless to speak of the great officers of state ; they were utterly dependent on the King's will, and were in the strictest sense the personal ministers of that will. The constitutional theory of later times was not dreamt of. We cannot but see in these considerations, slightly and super- ficially as we are able here to treat them, the strongest grounds for qualifying Mr. Froude's notion of the independence of the nobility of England under Henry the Eighth ; while the same remark that we made about the ease with which the clergy changed their religion according to Court opinions applies to the aristocracy also. They either were not men of strong and clear convictions, or they were powerless to act upon their convictions. The Commons were unquestionably rising in power and im- portance; and constitutional writers have traced the subserent influence of the House of Commons to the use Henry the Eighth habitually made of it after the Reformation had once set in. We are unfortunately deprived of any assistance in forming an esti- mate of the spirit of this House that might be derived from the de- bates of the important Parliament of 1529-'36, which occupies Mr. Froude's present two volumes, and which consummated the first stage of the Reformation. No record of those debates survives. But it is against all evidence on the general nature of the repre- sentation at this period to suppose that anything like freedom of election, in our meaning of the term, existed, or that anything like freedom of debate was allowed. We are expressly- told that a majority of the House consisted of persons holding office under the Crown, and we know that a member spoke under the imme- diate peril of censure and punishment if he offended the King. The business of the House of Commons in that day was not to originate or freely to discuss high matters of state ; even in our time such a power is only exercised in an ineffectual form where matters of foreign policy, or affecting the personal inclina- tions of the Sovereign, are concerned. In Henry the Eighth's time, ne the representatives of the people were far less interested than now in questions of general politics, and were principally concerned about taxation and trade and local privileges. We cannot discuss the question at length, nor do we pronounce de- cidedly against Mr. Froude's views ; but these considerations are familiar to all students of English history, and it does appear to us that Mr. Froude has entirely overlookedthem, and argues from acts of Parliament and records of other official bodies, as if these were so many expressions of opinion perfectly independent of the King, and to be taken much in the same sense as they would now bear, as testifying to a hearty support of the King's policy and acts on the part of the great official authorities of a free people. Neither does Mr. Fronde say a word or drop a hint as to the con- stitution of the judicial bodies before whom eases of high treason were tried, lie leaves his readers to suppose, if they knew no- thing more than he tells them that a person charged with this crime—and that will include all the worse eases of judicial mur- der in Henry's reign—had a perfectly .fair trial ; and that we may conclude the prisoner's real guilt or innocence from. the verdict,
much as we should in a case tried before a common jury of our awn day. We should like to ask him whether, seventy years later even he thinks Raleigh was tried fairly; and, generally, whether the even, trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are in
his estimation creditable to English history, and their verdicts de- cisivg either of the guilt of the victims or of the popular feelings of the nktion. In omitting to meet this objection' supported as it is by aisoncurrence of English writers of authority, Mr. Fronde cannot ht held to have made out his plea in defence of Henry..
But,. Nosing over such considerations as belong to the decision of the qadittion whether the English nation sanctioned the King's
conduct, only submitted to it because they had no adequate power eftesistince, and perhaps no very particular sensibility to the Ar#thes of 'Henry's wives or the lives of their eminent fellow subjects, let us proceed to the second part. of Mr. Froude's theory. Whether the King- alone, dr the nation jointly with him, is to be held responsible for the acts which historians have concurred in regarding as crimes, Mr. Fronde joins issue on the quality of these acts, and_pronouneeeathem not crimes, but measures of high political necessity, dictated by circumstances which historians have chosen to leave out of consideration. And these neglected cir- cumstances are just those which on the showing of the official do- cuments did, in the eyes of the King and of the authorities concur- ring in his acts, justify the unusual and severe measures complained of. We cannot of course go through each separate dot of Henry's reign to which exception has been made,, and which Mr. Froude defends. But as he expends. the strength of his argument on the divorce from Catherine of Arragon, and the severe measures adopted to enforce submission to the sentence of divorce and the legitimization of his marriage with Anne Boleyn and of his issue by her, we may confine our remarks to that angle case, and the more satisfactorily as the whole subsequent series of judicial mur- ders depends very closely upon this. Mx. Froude then rests upon the argument that-this divorce was urged by Henry, and supported by the estates of the realm and the nation at large, from the con- viction that the succession to the crown was exposed to serious doubt, from the fact that the marriage with Catherine was solem- nized in virtue of a Papal dispensation which was invalid, since the Pope's dispensing power did not reach for enough to justify marriage with & deceased brother's wife, where the first marriage had, been consummated. Now we are not, prepared to deny that. scruples of_ a eanonicalkind had very early suggestedthemselves to Henry, or that there were living persons nearly related to the throne who might, in case ofHenry's death leaving only the Princess Mary to succeed him, have set up pretensions danger- ous to her and to the peace of the realm. It may be admitted, that a. disputed succession, with its natural result of civil war. was exactly the evil likely to appear of even more than its. probable danger to English statesmen of the age succeeding the wars of the Roses. What danger there really Was, depended more, perhaps, upon the power of rival claimants, than upon the uncanomeal nature of the marriage between Henry and his brother Arthur's wife ; and of this danger the unfortunate Earl of: Warwick and the Dukes of Suffolk and Buckingham had been the victims, the first before Henry was King, and, the two latter shortly after. Granting, however, that the danger was enhance& by the peculiar nature of the marriage of Henry and Catherine,. was it lessened by the projected divorce ? Mr. Hallam says, in. language which the common sense of everybody will indorse, "The King's divorce, and the consequent. illegitimacy, of his eldest daughter, laid open the successtan.to fresh questions.' Un- questionably there was an additional element of uncertainty, an additional pretender backed by powerful partisans at home and by the Emperor Charles the Fifth and. the Pope abroad. NO one acting' simply with a view to settle the succession and relieve, the country from the danger of civil war, would have hit upon the divorce as likely to produce these results. So much was I priori. 'probable : how did it actually tarn out ? Why, that the. soh* chance of a disputed succession arose from Henry's own act in. a:miring his daughters Mary and -Elizabeth successively illegiti- mate; that Elizabeth's whole reign was disturbed by claimants who disputed her throne on. the very ground that she was not legitimate ; that, after all, so weak were the rival claimants, that,. in spite of the advantage derived from Henry's capricious, and.. violent proceedings, his three children reigned in succession and finally the crown came peacefully to the next collateral tu:anoh. Either the statesmen of Henry the Eighth must have been very shortsighted_ and perverse, or they were merely obeying the im- perious dictates of their master's passions. But though, as results proved, he was. mistaken in his views of what was necessary to settle the succession, he may' have been_ really sincere and. unselfish in. the means he took for a good and wise end. That can. hardly be settled by the declaration. of his motives made to his ambassadors to the Pope and the other European Sovereign, nor by the preambles of the acts of Parliament about the matter. Mr. Froude would. hardly expect the King to acknowledge other than state motives, nor the Parliament either. Kings and state councils are not wont to commit their genuine private reasons to official record. But we have another test for Henry's conduct. Catherine of Ar- ragon was not the only wife he divorced without beheading for adultery. Anne of Cleves sabred the same fate, under circum- stances which even Mi. Fronde cannot bring under motives of state policy. At that time, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth were living; there was no danger to the succession which the King'S divorce and new marriage could avert. Did the King hesitate to divorce his fifth wife to gratify his personal dislike simply? Did he hesitate to bring forward in this case too his canonical scru- ple of a pretingagement with the Duke of Lorraine, and his state motive of a desire to settle the succession ? Did the Privy Council, the House of Peers the House of Commons hesi- tate to grant his wishes and incloge his reasons ? Did his Arch- bishop Cranmer either hesitate to urge these reasons upon the House of Lords, or to execute as chief ecclesiastical judge the mandates of the Head of the Church of England ? And if Mn. Froude cannot answer one of these questions in the negative, why are we to be called upon to reverse the unanimous verdict of history on the earlier divorce ? why should we not continue to say with Sir James Mackintosh, " Ihe people saw nothing in the transaction, but the sacrifice of an innocen woman to the passions
of a dissolute monarch, which was in truth its most important and essential character " ?
With this question of the divorce of Henry and Catharine, with the moral character given to it, and to the assent of-the English authorities to it, are closely connected the judgments that must be passed upon all the darkest transactions of the reign.; though, even allowing Henry to have been justified in this, it will be difficult to prove to the satisfaction of ordinary minds that many of the executions which _followed were either legal or excusable violations of law. Mr. Froude has only just overstepped the threshold of his work, yet the deaths of Sir Thomas More and Bishep Fisher fall within these volumes, which close with the execution of Anne Boleyn, whom Mr. Fronde inclines to consider as indubitably guilty, and Whom it would be certainly impossible to acquit if trials such as hers hadheen anything but a mockery. But Mr. Fronde believes implicitly in the freedom, courage, and -honour of the Englishmen of that day. Whatever was done by the great public bodies was, or appeased to them right. They were not merely the instruments of the royal will, but the co- operators with him in a policy stern indeed and unsparing, but grand, decisive, and triumphant. It was civil war under the forms of peace—martyrs on one side, statesmen-executioners on the other, but both fearless high-principled, and ready to change places, as indeed they often diEt during. the whole period he has undertaken to describe. This is briefly the spirit of Mr. Froude's work ; and, viewed thus, the men of that time assume
a deur which fascinates the reader so long as he keeps his
ent in suspense —a process which is aided by Mr. Froude's suppression of many incidents narrated in the ordi- nary histories of the period, which would tell both against particular characters and against the freedom and sagacity of Parliament. But, even as it is, few readers will be so far carried away by Mr. Froude's fervid sympathies, as not to be shocked at the sort of grim approval bestowed upon such acts as the visiting the whole of the clergy with a prannunire for an offence in which the King was a particeps crimims, and indeed its instigator, and for such far more heinous acts as the execution of More and Maher. As Mr. Fronde proceeds, he will find his difficulties grow Upon him. He will have to give up his King and his Parliament, or he must defend acts of attainder without trial ; he will have to reconcile his admiration of Cromwell with a justification of his execution as a traitor by such an act of attainder • he must sup- pose the King a tyrant and the Parliament his abettor in tyranny, or he must think the old Countess of Salisbury was justly put to death simply for being Countess of Salisbury, as her brother had been murdered before her for no better reason.; he must justify the murder of the gallant and piincely Surrey for having by the licence of the'heralds' college quartered the royal arms. All these and many, like acts Henry, his Judges, and This Parliaments, com- mitted: they also freed their country from subjection to the Bishop of Rome, and established the Reformed doctrine, and maintained the honour of England as an European power. Taken as a whole, the reign was a glorious as well as highly important (era in Eng- lish history. But regard for human life and liberty, abhorrence of violence and cruelty, any sense of the rights that an individual man has in virtue of possessing reason and conscience, were not among its virtues ; and no reign of an English king did more to habituate the nation to trifle with the safeguards of the subject's freedom, to see law wrested into an instrument of oppression and personal vengeance, and constitutional forms made to subserve the views and passions of a court. Relentless determination and unscrupulous violence may be necessary agents in revolutionizing a country ; but we all nuke a distinction in the exercise of such qualities, according to the conception we form of the motives and -insight of the actors. Mr. Froud.e seems to us to interpret the actions of the statesmen of Henry the Eighth, and of the King himself, in a manner that would go far to justify any action of a government that was sharp and decisive. The massacre of St. Bartholomew would in this mode of viewing things be a splendid stroke of vigorous policy. " Salus populi supreme lex " is his motto, and the rulers are to be the judges. His book is splendidly written, and, but for this-exaggeration of a true principle—which, however, taints it throughout—we have nothing but admiration to express.
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