brought over a
Spanish army to coerce their Protestant fellow-subjects and their
lawful sovereign? That, and not speculative error, is the real
charge against them. Henry did all he could to put himself in the
wrong. His atrocious request that More "would not use many words on
the scaffold" makes one hate him after the lapse of well-nigh four
hundred years. The question, however, is not one of personal
feeling. Good men go wrong. Bad men are made by providence to be
instruments for good. It is not More, nor Fisher, it is the
Bluebeard of the children's history-books who gave England Miles
Coverdale's Bible, who freed her from the yoke that oppressed France
till the Revolution, and oppresses Spain to-day. Froude's first four
volumes are an eloquent indictment of Ultramontanism, a plea for the
Reformation, a sustained argument for English liberties and freedom
of thought. No such book can be impartial in the sense of admitting
that there is as much to be said on one side as on the other. Froude
replied to The Edinburgh Review in Fraser's Magazine for September,
1858, and in the following month the reviewer retorted. He did not
really shake the foundation of Froude's case, which was the same as
Luther's. Luther, like Froude, was no democrat. To both of them the
Reformation was a protest against ecclesiastical tyranny, or for
spiritual freedom. "The comedy has ended in a marriage," said
Erasmus of Luther and Luther's wife. It was not a comedy, and it had
not ended.

Froude sometimes goes too far. When he defends the Boiling Act,
under which human beings were actually boiled alive in Smithfield,
he shakes confidence in his judgment. He sets too much value upon
the verdicts of Henry's tribunals, forgetting Macaulay's emphatic
declaration that State trials before 1688 were murder under the
forms of law. Although the subject of his Prize Essay at Oxford was
"The Influence of the Science of Political Economy upon the Moral
and Social Welfare of a Nation," he never to the end of his life
understood what political economy was. Misled by Carlyle, he
conceived it to be a sort of "Gospel," a rival system to the
Christian religion, instead of useful generalisations from the
observed course of trade. He never got rid of the idea that
Governments could fix the rate of wages and the price of goods. A
more serious fault found by The Edinburgh reviewer, the ablest of
all Froude's critics, was the implication rather than the assertion
th