en
with low motives is the vice of ignoble minds. The reign of Henry
VIII., after Wolsey's fall, was rich in horrors and in tragical
catastrophes. But it was not a mere carnival of lust and blood. High
principles were at stake, and profound issues divided parties,
beside which the levity of Anne Boleyn and the eyes of Jane Seymour
were not worth a moment's thought. Hobbes wondered that a Parliament
man worth thousands of pounds, like Hampden, to pay twenty shillings
for ship-money, as if the amount had anything to do with the
principle that taxes could only be levied by the House of Commons.
Henry's vices are dust in the balance against the fact that he stood
for England against Rome. It is one of Froude's chief merits that he
never fails to see the wood for the trees, never forgets general
propositions to lose himself in details. A novice whose own mind is
a blank may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that
any events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century.
He will not read many pages of Froude before he perceives that the
sixteenth century established our national independence.

Two of Froude's pet hobbies may be found in his Inaugural Lecture.
There is the theory that judgment falls upon idleness and vice,
which he adopted from Carlyle. There is his own doctrine that the
Statute Book furnishes the most authentic material of history. It is
no answer to say that preambles are inserted by Ministers, who put
their own case and not the case of the nation. In the use or
reception of all evidence allowance must be made for the source from
which it comes. But even Governments do not invent out of their own
heads, or put into statutes what is foreign to the public mind. They
employ the arguments most likely to prevail, and these must be
closely connected with the circumstances of the day. No recital in
an Act of parliament can prove incontestably that the monasteries
were stews, or worse. That such a thing could be plausibly alleged,
and generally believed, is itself important, and history must take
account of popular views. Debates were not reported in the sixteenth
century, nor was freedom of speech in Parliament recognised by the
Crown. There was nothing to ensure a fair trial for the victims of a
royal prosecution, and testimony obtained by torture was accepted as
authentic. All these are facts, and to neglect them is to go astray.
But they do not prove that every public document is un