them could even criticise him intelligently. That he was not
thoroughly acquainted with the periods preceding his own may be more
plausibly argued. There must of course be some limit. The siege of
Troy can be told without mention of Leda's egg. But if Froude had
given a little more time to Henry VII., and all that followed the
Battle of Bosworth, he would have approached the fall of Wolsey and
the rise of Cromwell with a more thorough understanding of cause and
effect. His mind moved with great rapidity, and went so directly to
the point that the circumstances were not always fully weighed. It
is possible to see the truth too clearly, without allowance for
drawbacks and qualifications. The important fact about Henry, for
instance, is that he was a statesman who had to provide for a
peaceful succession. But he was also a wilful, headstrong, arbitrary
man, spoiled from his cradle by flatterers, and determined to have
his own way. Froude saw the absurdity of the Blue-beard delusion,
and did immense service in exposing it. He would have given no
handle to his Roman Catholic and Anglo-Catholic enemies if he had
acknowledged that there was an explanation of the error. He was
sometimes carried away by his own eloquence, and his convictions
grew stronger as he expressed them, until the facts on the other
side looked so small that they were ignored.

History deals, and can only deal, with consequences and results.
Motives and Intentions, however interesting, belong to another
sphere. Henry and Cromwell, Mary and Pole, Elizabeth and Cecil, are
tried in Froude's pages by the simple test of what they did, or
failed to do, for England. Froude detested and despised the
cosmopolitan philosophy which regards patriotic sentiment as a relic
of barbarism. He was not merely an historian of England, but also an
English historian; and holding Fisher to be a traitor, he did not
hesitate to justify the execution of a pious, even saintly man.
Fisher would no doubt have said that it was far more important to
preserve the Catholic faith in England than to keep England
independent of Spain. Froude would have replied that unless the
nation punished those who sought for the aid of Spanish troops
against their own countrymen, she would soon cease to be a nation at
all. His critics evaded the point, and took refuge in talk about
bloody tyrants wreaking vengeance upon harmless old men.

If patriotism be not a disqualification for an historian, Froude