. He had not only achieved his
own object: he also smoothed the path of future labourers in the same
field. It was the inaccessibility of the records at Simancas that
enabled Freeman to accuse Froude of not correctly transcribing or
abstracting manuscripts. Like other people, he made mistakes; but
mistakes have to be weighed as well as counted, and even in
enumerating Froude's we must always remember that he used more
original matter than any other modern historian.

CHAPTER VI

IRELAND AND AMERICA

Froude had made history the business of his life, and he had no
sooner completed his History of England than he turned his attention
to the sister people. The Irish chapters in his great book had been
picked out by hostile critics as especially good, and in them he had
strongly condemned the cruel misgovernment of an Englishman otherwise
so humane as Essex. While he was in Ireland he had examined large
stores of material in Dublin, which he compared with documents at the
Record Office in London, and he contemplated early in 1871, if not
before, a book on Irish history. For this task he was not altogether
well qualified. The religion of Celtic Ireland was repugnant to him,
and he never thoroughly understood it. In religious matters Froude
could not be neutral. Where Catholic and Protestant came into
conflict, he took instinctively, almost involuntarily, the Protestant
side. In the England of the sixteenth century the Protestant side was
the side of England. In Ireland the case was reversed, and the spirit
of Catholicism was identical with the spirit of nationality. Irish
Catholics to this day associate Protestantism with the sack of
Drogheda and Wexford, with the detested memory of Oliver Cromwell. To
Froude, as to Carlyle, Cromwell was the minister of divine vengeance
upon murderous and idolatrous Papists. His liking for the Irish,
though perfectly genuine, was accompanied with an underlying contempt
which is more offensive to the objects of it than the hatred of an
open foe. He regarded them as a race unfit for self-government, who
had proved their unworthiness of freedom by not winning it with the
sword. If they had not quarrelled among themselves, and betrayed one
another, they would have established their right to independence; or,
if there had been still an Act of Union, they could have come in, as
the Scots came, on their own terms. For an Englishman to write the
history of Ireland without prejudice he must be