When Freeman
was most hopelessly wrong he always began to parody Macaulay.
Corruptio optimi pessima. "Ark Raleigh" means Raleigh's ship, and
Froude took the name, "Ark Rawlie" as it was then spelt, from the
manuscripts at the Rolls House. He was of course right, and Freeman
was wrong. But that is not all. Freeman could easily have put himself
right if he had chosen to take the trouble. Edwards's Life of Raleigh
appeared in 1868, and a copy of it is in Freeman's library at Owens
College. Edwards gives an account of the Ark Raleigh, which was built
for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh advancing two hundred pounds.
Freeman, however, need not have read this book to find out the truth.
For "the Ark Raleigh" occurs fourteen times in a Calendar of
Manuscripts from 1581 to 1590, published by Robert Lemon in 1865.
When Freeman was brought to book, and taxed with this gross blunder,
he pleaded that he "did a true verdict give according to such
evidence as came before him." The implied analogy is misleading.
Jurymen are bound by their oaths, and by their duty, to find a
verdict one way or the other. Freeman was under no obligation to say
anything about the Ark Raleigh. Prudence and ignorance might well
have restrained his pen.

Two blots in Froude's History Freeman may, I think, be acknowledged
to have hit. One was intellectual; the other was moral. It was pure
childishness to suggest that Froude had never heard of the peine
forte et dure, and only invincible prejudice could have dictated such
a sentence as "That Mr. Froude's law would be queer might be taken as
a matter of course."* Still, it is true, and a serious misfortune,
that Froude took very little interest in legal and constitutional
questions. For, while they had not the same importance in the
sixteenth century as they had in the seventeenth, they cannot be
disregarded to the extent in which Froude disregarded them without
detracting from the value of his book as a whole. He did not sit
down, like Hallam, to write a constitutional history, and he could
not be expected to deal with his subject from that special point of
view. Freeman's complaint, which is quite just, was that he neglected
almost entirely the relations of the Crown with the Houses of
Parliament and with the courts of law. The moral blot accounts for a
good deal of the indignation which Froude excited in minds far less
jaundiced than Freeman's. No one hated injustice more than Froude.
But cruelty as such d