y all the worst
cruelties ever inflicted by tyrants for political objects, from the
burning of Christians who refused incense for the Roman Emperor to
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel.

--
* Saturday Review, Jan. 29th, 1870.
+ Saturday Review, Dec. 1st, 1867.
--

The analogy of a commander in active service is inadequate.
Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active
service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any
Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners. Unless the
end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack
was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either
confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy
Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for
the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus
describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with
him in 1586. "They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the
letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony
was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due
precautions for the protraction of the pain. If it was to be taken as
part of the Catholic creed that to kill a prince in the interests of
Holy Church was an act of piety and merit, stern English common sense
caught the readiest means of expressing its opinion on the character
both of the creed and its professors."

Stern English common sense! To suggest that the English people had
anything to do with it is a libel on the English nation. Elizabeth
had the decency to forbid the repetition of such atrocities. That she
should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as
his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude's.

On the 12th of January, 1870, Freeman delivered in The Saturday
Review his final verdict on Froude's History of England from the Fall
of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. It is one of the most
preposterous judgments that ever found their way into print. In
knowledge of the subject, and in patient assiduity of research,
Froude was immeasurably Freeman's superior, and his life had been
devoted to historic studies. Yet this was the language in which the
editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to
write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died:
"He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name