thers.* His readers are expected, if not to see
with his eyes, at least to look from his point of view. Honestly
believing that the Reformation was a great and beneficent fact in
the progress of mankind, he was incapable of treating it as a sinful
rebellion against the authority of the Church. Holding Henry VIII.,
with all his faults, to have been the champion of the laity against
the clergy, of spiritual and intellectual freedom against the Roman
yoke, he could not represent him as a monster of wickedness,
trampling on morality for his own selfish ends. Doing full justice
to the conscientiousness of Mary Tudor, excusing her more than some
think she ought to be excused, he depicted the heroes of her bloody
reign not only in Latimer and Ridley, but in the scores and hundreds
of lowlier persons who died for the faith of Christ.

--
* "Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth or error, but
that anything is true to a man which he troweth? and not rather, as
the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable
it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our
moral as well as our intellectual being?"--Newman's Grammar of
Assent, p. 311.
--

Protestant as he was, however, Froude was an Englishman first and a
Protestant afterwards. One might say of his history, as was said of
the drama which Tennyson founded upon the fifth and sixth volumes,
that the true heroine is the English people. Much of his popularity
was due to his patriotism and his Protestantism. On the other hand
he gave deep and lasting offence to High Churchmen, which they
neither forgot nor forgave. They could not bear the spectacle of a
Church established by statute, of the king in place of the Pope, of
Cromwell and Cranmer justified, of More and Fisher condemned. While
not unwilling to profit by Erastianism, they liked its origin kept
out of sight. Bishops appointed by the Crown and sitting in the
House of Lords, though awkward facts, were too familiar to be
upsetting. The secular and Parliamentary origin of praemunire and
conge d' elire were less notorious and more disagreeable subjects.
They were indeed to be found in Hallam. But Hallam had not the
popularity or the influence of Froude. Constitutional histories are
for the learned classes. Froude wrote for men of the world. The
consummate dexterity of his style was only observed by trained
critics; its ease and grace were the unconscious delight of the
humblest