stants enough Heaven would give her a son,
was the conviction of a lunatic. Her own husband fled from her, and
left her with no earthly consolation save the stake. But Pole was
sane enough when he burnt better Christians than himself. The true
story of Mary's reign deserved to be told as Froude could tell it.
The tale has two sides, and is a warning which has been taken to
heart. Mary's subjects could not rebel. Her Spanish husband had
behind him the military strength of a great Power. But never again,
except during the brief and disastrous period which led to the
expulsion of the second James, has England endured a Catholic
sovereign. Neither her rulers nor her laws have always been just to
Catholics. To tolerate intolerance, though a truly Christian lesson,
is hard to learn. Mary Tudor and Reginald Pole taught the English
people once for all what the triumph of Catholicism meant. So long
as they are not supreme, Catholics are the best of subjects, of
citizens, of neighbours, of friends. There is only one country in
Europe where they are supreme now, and that country is Spain. They
might have been supreme in England for at least a century if it had
not been for the daughter of Katharine of Aragon and the Legate of
Julius III.

Froude had now completed the first part of his great History. The
second part, the reign of Elizabeth, was reserved for future issue
in separately numbered volumes. The death of Macaulay in December,
1859, left Froude the most famous of living English historians, and
the ugly duckling of the brood had become the glory of the family.
The reception of his first six volumes was a curious one. The
general public read, and admired. The few critics who were competent
to form an instructed and impartial opinion perceived that, while
there were errors in detail, the story of the English Reformation,
and of the Catholic reaction which followed it, had been for the
first time thoroughly told. Many years afterwards Froude said to
Tennyson that the most essential quality in an historian was
imagination. This true and profound remark is peculiarly liable to
be misunderstood. People who do not know what imagination means are
apt to confound it with invention, although the latter quality is
really the last resort of those who are destitute of the former.
Froude was an ardent lover of the truth, and desired nothing so much
as to tell it. But it must be the truth as perceived by him, not as
it might appear to o