staunch Tory, he never varied in his opposition to Liberalism, as
well ecclesiastical as political, and he had no sympathy with the
reformers. But his simple, manly, pious character was incapable of
supporting his cause by personal slander. Unlike Freeman, he had a
rich vein of racy humour, which he indulged in a famous epigram on
Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation. But he could
appreciate Froude's learning and industry, for he was a real student
himself.

The controversy between Froude and Freeman, however, was by no means
at an end, and I may as well proceed at once to the conclusion of it,
chronology notwithstanding. In the year 1877, Froude contributed to
The Nineteenth Century a series of papers on the Life and Times of
Thomas Becket, since republished in the fourth volume of his Short
Studies. Full of interesting information, the result of minute pains,
and excellent in style, they make no pretence to be, as the History
was, a work of original research. They are indeed founded upon the
Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, which Canon Robertson had
edited for the Master of the Rolls in the previous year. They were of
course read by every one, because they were written by Froude,
whereas Robertson's learned Introduction would only have been read by
scholars. Froude's conclusions were much the same as the erudite
Canon's. He did not pretend to know the twelfth century as he knew
the sixteenth, and he avowedly made use of another man's knowledge to
point his favourite moral that emancipation from ecclesiastical
control was a necessary stage in the development of English freedom.
He may have been unconsciously affected by his familiarity with the
quarrel between Wolsey and Henry VIII. in describing the quarrel
between Becket and Henry II. The Church of the middle ages discharged
invaluable functions which in later times were more properly
undertaken by the State. Froude sided with Henry, and showed, as he
had not much difficulty in showing, that there were a good many spots
on the robe of Becket's saintliness. The immunity of Churchmen, that
is, of clergymen, from the jurisdiction of secular tribunals was not
conducive either to morality or to order.

Froude's essays might have been forgotten, like other brilliant
articles in other magazines, if Freeman had let them alone. But the
spectacle of Froude presuming to write upon those earlier periods of
which The Saturday Review had so often and so dog