It was with just pride, and natural satisfaction, that Froude wrote to Lady Derby in May, 1890: "I am revising my English History for a final edition. Since I wrote it the libraries and archives of all Europe have been searched and sifted. I am fairly astonished to find how little I shall have to alter. The book is of course young, but I do not know that it is the worse on that account. That fault at any rate I shall not try to cure."
The Divorce of Katharine of Aragon, though not published till 1891, is a sequel to the History. The twenty years which had intervened did not lead Froude to modify any of his main conclusions, and he was able to furnish new evidence in support of them. The correspondence of Chapuys, Imperial Amba.s.sador at the court of Henry VIII., puts Fisher"s treason beyond doubt, and proves that the bishop was endeavouring to procure an invasion by Spanish troops when the king, in Freeman"s language, "slaughtered" him. The next year Froude brought out, in a volume with other essays, his Spanish Story of the Armada, written in his raciest manner, and proving from Spanish sources the grotesque incompetence of Medina Sidonia. There are few better narratives in the language, and the enthusiastic admiration of a great American humourist was as well deserved as it is charmingly expressed.
"The other night," wrote Bret Harte, "I took up Longman"s Magazine* and began to lazily read something about the Spanish Armada. My knowledge of that historic event, I ought to say, is rather hazy; I remember a vague something about Drake playing bowls while the Spanish fleet was off the coast, and of Elizabeth going to Tilbury en grande tenue, but there was always a good deal of "Jingo" shouting and Crystal Palace fireworks about it, and it never seemed real. In the article I was reading the style caught me first; I became tremendously interested; it was a new phase of the old story, and yet there was something pleasantly familiar. I turned to the last page quickly, and saw your blessed name. I had heard nothing about it before. Then I went through it breathlessly to the last word, which came all too soon. And now I am as eager for the next instalment as I was when a boy for the next chapter of my d.i.c.kens or Thackeray. Don"t laugh, dear old fellow, over my enthusiasm or my ill.u.s.tration, but remember that I represent a considerable amount of average human nature, and that"s what we all write for, and ought to write for, and be dashed to the critics who say to the contrary! I thought your parallel of Philip and Don Quixote delightful, but the similitude of Medina Sidonia and Sancho Panza is irresistible. That letter to Philip is Sancho"s own hand! Where did you get it? How long have you had it up your sleeve? Have you got any more such cards to play? Can you not give us a picture of those gentlemen adventurers with their exalted beliefs, their actual experiences, their little jealousies, and the love-lorn Lope de Vega in their midst? What mankind you have come upon, dear Froude! How I envy you! Have you nothing to spare for a poor literary man like myself, who has made all he could out of the hulk of a poor old Philippine galleon on Pacific seas? Couldn"t you lend me a Don or a galley-slave out of that delightful crew of solemn lunatics? And yet how splendid are those last orders of the Duke! With what a swan-like song they sailed away!"
- * The successor to Fraser. -
The letter from Medina Sidonia to Philip, which reminded both Froude and Bret Harte of Sancho Panza, is too delicious not to be given in full.
"My health is bad, and from my small experience of the water I know that I am always sea-sick. I have no money which I can spare, I owe a million ducats, and I have not a real to spend on my outfit. The expedition is on such a scale, and the object is of such high importance, that the person at the head of it ought to understand navigation and sea-fighting, and I know nothing of either. I have not one of those essential qualifications. I have no acquaintance among the officers who are to serve under me. Santa Cruz had information about the state of things in England; I have none. Were I competent otherwise, I should have to act in the dark by the opinion of others, and I cannot tell to whom I may trust. The Adelantado of Castile would do better than I. Our Lord would help him, for he is a good Christian, and has fought in several battles. If you send me, depend upon it, I shall have a bad account to render of my trust."*
- * Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 19, 20. -
"Those last orders of the Duke"-the same Duke, by the way-are "splendid" enough of their kind. "From highest to lowest you are to understand the object of our expedition, which is to recover countries to the Church now oppressed by the enemies of the true faith. I therefore beseech you to remember your calling, so that G.o.d may be with us in what we do. I charge you, one and all, to abstain from profane oaths, dishonouring to the names of our Lord, our Lady, and the Saints. All personal quarrels are to be suspended while the expedition lasts, and for a month after it is completed. Neglect of this will be held as treason. Each morning at sunrise the ship-boys, according to custom, will sing "Good Morrow" at the foot of the mainmast, and at sunset the "Ave Maria." Since bad weather may interrupt the communications the watchword is laid down for each day in the week: Sunday, Jesus; the days succeeding, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Trinity, Santiago, the Angels, All Saints, and Our Lady."*
- * Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 27, 28. -
"G.o.d and one," it has been said, "make a majority." But in this case G.o.d was not on the side of the pious and incompetent Medina Sidonia.
It was not till this same year 1892, after Freeman"s death, that the "Calendar of Letters and State Papers relative to English affairs preserved princ.i.p.ally in the Archives of Simancas" began to be published in England by the Master of the Rolls. Translated by an eminent scholar, Mr. Martin Hume, and printed in a book, they could have been read by Freeman himself, and can be read by any one who cares to undertake the task. They will at least give some idea of the enormous labour undergone by Froude in his several sojourns at Simancas. I cannot profess to have inst.i.tuted a systematic comparison, but a few specimens selected at random show that Froude summarised fairly the doc.u.ments with which he dealt. That there should be some discrepancies was inevitable.
Philip II. wrote a remarkably bad hand, and his Amba.s.sadors were not chosen for their penmanship. The most striking fact in the case is that Mr. Hume has derived a.s.sistance from Froude in the performance of his own duties. "I have," he writes in his Introduction, "very carefully compared the Spanish text when doubtful with Mr. Froude"s extracts and copies and with transcripts of many of the letters in the British Museum." Nothing could give a better idea than this sentence of the difficulties which Froude had to surmount, or of the fidelity with which he surmounted them. 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 ma.n.u.scripts. 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 Ess.e.x. While he was in Ireland he had examined large stores of material in Dublin, which he compared with doc.u.ments 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 a.s.sociate 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 either a cosmopolitan philosopher, or a pa.s.sionless recluse. Froude was an ardent patriot, and his early studies in hagiology had led him to the conclusion, not now accepted, that St. Patrick never existed at all. His scepticism about St. Patrick might have been forgiven to a man who had probably not much belief in St. George. But Froude could not help running amok at all the popular heroes of Ireland. In the first of his two papers describing a fortnight in Kerry he went out of his way to depreciate the fame of Daniel O"Connell. "Ireland," he wrote, "has ceased to care for him. His fame blazed like a straw bonfire, and has left behind it scarce a shovelful of ashes. Never any public man had it in his power to do so much good for his country, nor was there ever one who accomplished so little."*
- * Short Studies, vol. ii. p. 241. -
That O"Connell wasted much time in clamouring for Repeal is perfectly true. But he was as much the author of Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation as Cobden was the author of Free Trade, and that fact alone should have debarred Froude from the use of this extravagant language. For though an article in Fraser"s Magazine is a very different thing from a serious history, print imposes some obligations, and even two or three casual sentences may show the bent of a man"s mind. Whatever Froude wrote on Ireland, or on anything else, was sure to be widely read, and to affect, for good or for evil, the opinion of the British public. It was therefore peculiarly inc.u.mbent on him not to flatter English pride by wounding Irish self-respect.
While Froude was writing his English in Ireland he received an invitation to give a series of lectures in the United States. "The Yankees," he says to Skelton,+ "have written to me about going over to lecture to them. I am strongly tempted; but I could not tell the truth about Ireland without reflecting in a good many ways on my own country. I don"t fancy doing that, however justly, to amuse Jonathan." These words certainly do not show implacable bitterness against Ireland. Brought face to face with responsibility, Froude always felt the weight of it, and he was never consciously unfair. He was under a strong sense of obligation, which he felt bound to fulfil. It is impossible not to admire the chivalrous and intrepid spirit with which he undertook singlehanded to justify the conduct of his countrymen before the American people, and to persuade them that England had provocation for her treatment of Ireland. Once convinced that his cause was righteous, he never flinched. He believed that false views of the Irish question prevailed in America, and that he could set them right. He did not altogether underrate the magnitude of the enterprise. "I go like an Arab of the desert," he wrote to Skelton a little later: "my hand will be against every man, and therefore every man"s hand will be against me."* A belief in Ireland"s wrongs was part of the American creed, like the faithlessness of Charles II. and the tyranny of George III. Irish Americans had enormous influence at elections, in Congress, and in the newspapers. Released Fenians, O"Donovan Rossa among them, had been spreading what they called the light, and their own countrymen at all events believed what they said. The American people as a whole were not unfriendly to England. The Alabama Arbitration and the Geneva Award had destroyed the ill feeling that remained after the fall of Richmond. But it was not worth the while of any American politician to alienate the Irish vote, and most Americans honestly thought, not without reason, that the policy of England in Ireland had been abominable. To let sleeping dogs lie might be wise. Once they were unchained, no American hand would help to chain them up again. Froude, however, conceived that circ.u.mstances were unusually favourable. The Irish Church had been disestablished, and the Fenian prisoners had been set free. The Irish Land Act of 1870 had recognised the Irish tenant"s right to a partnership in the soil. Although Froude had no sympathy, ecclesiastical or political, with Gladstone, he did think that the Land Act was a just and beneficent measure from which good would come. In the firm belief that he could vindicate the statesmanship of his own country before American audiences without sacrificing the paramount claims of truth and justice, he accepted the invitation.
- + Table Talk of Shirley, p. 149.
* Table Talk of Shirley, p. 151.
- After a summer cruise in a big schooner with his friend Lord Ducie, whose hospitality at sea he often in coming years enjoyed, Froude sailed from Liverpool in the Russia at the end of September, 1872, with the distinguished physicist John Tyndall. He was a good sailor, and loved a voyage. In his first letter to his wife from American soil he describes a storm with the delight of a schoolboy. "On Sat.u.r.day morning it blew so hard that it was scarcely possible to stand on deck. The wind and waves dead ahead, and the whole power of the engines only just able to move the ship against it. It was the grandest sight I ever witnessed-the splendid Russia, steady as if she were on a railway, holding her straight course without yielding one point to the sea-up the long hill-sides of the waves and down into the troughs-the crests of the sea all round as far as the eye could reach in one wild whirl of foam and spray. It was worth coming into the Atlantic to see-with the sense all the time of perfect security."
Froude"s visit was in one respect well timed. President Grant had just been a.s.sured of his second term, and even politicians had leisure to think of their famous guest. He was at once invited to a great banquet in New York, and found himself lodged with sumptuous hospitality in a luxurious hotel at the expense of the Bureau which had organised the lectures. One newspaper quaintly described him as "looking like a Scotch farmer, with an open frank face and calm mild eyes." His History was well known, for the Scribners had sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. His opinions were of course freely invited, and he did not hesitate to give them. "I talk much Toryism to them all, and ridicule the idea of England"s decay, or of our being in any danger of revolution; and with Colonies and India and Commerce, etc., I insist that we are just as big as they are, and have just as large a future before us." Both Froude and his hosts might have remembered with advantage Disraeli"s fine saying that great nations are those which produce great men. But the sensual idolatry of mere size is almost equally common on both sides of the Atlantic.
The banquet was given by Froude"s American publishers, the Scribners, and his old acquaintance Emerson was one of the company. Another was a popular clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, and a third was the present Amba.s.sador of the United States in London, Mr. Whitelaw Reid. In his speech Froude referred to the object of his visit. He had heard at home that "one of the most prominent Fenian leaders," O"Donovan Rossa, "was making a tour in the United States, dilating upon English tyranny and the wrongs of Ireland." That Froude should cross the seas to confute O"Donovan Rossa must have struck the audience as scarcely credible, until he explained his mission, for as such he regarded it, by a.s.serting that "the judgment of America has more weight in Ireland than twenty batteries of English cannon." When the Irish had the management of their own affairs, he continued, the result was universal misery. They could not govern themselves in the sixteenth century; therefore they could not govern themselves in the nineteenth. If American opinion would only tell the Irish that they had no longer any grievances which legislation could redress, the Irish would believe it, and all would be well.
Though courteously treated as a representative Englishman, Froude had of course no official position, and he hoped that as a private individual his voice might be heard. But, while there were thousands of native Americans who had no love for their Irish fellow-citizens, there were very few indeed who cared to take up England"s case against Ireland. The Democratic party were inclined to sympathise with Home Rule as being a mild form of Secession, and the Republican party did not see why Ireland should be refused the qualified independence enjoyed by every State of the Union. In these unfavourable circ.u.mstances Froude delivered his first lecture. He made a good point when he described the Irish peasant in Munster or Connaught looking to America as his natural protector. "There is not a lad," he exclaimed, "in an Irish national school who does not pore over the maps of the States which hang on the walls, gaze on them with admiration and hope, and count the years till he too shall set his foot in those famous cities which float before his imagination like the gardens of Aladdin." Nevertheless he asked his hearers and readers to take it from him that Ireland had no longer any good ground of complaint against the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Independence she could not have, and that not because the interests of Great Britain forbade it, which would have been an intelligible argument, but because she was unfit for it herself.
"If I were to sum up in one sentence the secret of Ireland"s misfortunes, I should say it lay in this: that while from the first she has resisted England, complained of England, appealed to heaven and earth against the wrongs which England has inflicted on her, she has ever invited others to help her, and has never herself made an effective fight for her own rights .... A majority of hustings votes might be found for a separation. The majority would be less considerable if instead of a voting-paper they were called to handle a rifle."
To tell Irishmen that they could obtain liberty by fighting for it, and would never get it in any other way, was not likely to conciliate them, or to promote the cause of peace. Froude"s appeal to American opinion, however, was more practical.
"The Irishman requires to be ruled, but ruled as all men ought to be, by the laws of right and wrong, laws which shall defend the weak from the strong and the poor from the rich. When the poor peasant is secured the reward of his own labour, and is no longer driven to the blunderbuss to save himself and his family from legalised robbery, if he prove incorrigible then, I will give him up. But the experiment remains to be made."
An example had been set by Gladstone in the Land Act, and that was the path which further legislation ought to follow. So far there would not be much disagreement between Froude and most Irish Americans. Rack-renting upon the tenants" improvements was the bane of Irish agriculture, and the Act of 1870 was precisely what Froude described it, a partial antidote. Then the lecturer reverted to ancient history, to the Annals of the Four Masters, and the Danish invasion. The audience found it rather long, and rather dull, even though Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick were all built by the Danes. But a foundation had to be laid, and Froude felt bound also to make it clear that he did not take the old Whig view of Government as a necessary evil, or swear by the "dismal science" of Adam Smith.
He concluded his first lecture in words which at once defined his position and challenged the whole Irish race. "It was not tyranny," he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving Ireland to herself which she demands so pa.s.sionately that was the cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for instruction, but to look out for mistakes. An article in The New York Tribune, which spoke of Froude with admiration and esteem, told him plainly enough how it would be. "We have had historical lecturers before, but never any who essayed with such industry, learning, and eloquence to convince a nation that its sympathies for half a century at least have have been misplaced .... The thesis which he only partly set out for the night-that the misfortunes of Ireland are rather due to the congenital qualities of the race than to wrongs inflicted by their conquerors-will excite earnest and perhaps bitter controversy." This prediction was abundantly fulfilled, and the controversy spoiled the tour. A friendly and sympathetic journalist questioned Froude"s "wisdom in coming before our people with this course of lectures on Irish history ... We do not care for the domestic troubles of other nations, and it is a piece of impertinence to thrust them upon our attention. Mr. Froude knows perfectly well that England would resent, and rightfully, the least interference on our part with her Irish policy or her Irish subjects."
In this criticism there is a large amount of common sense, and Froude would have done well to think of it before. He was not, however, a man to be put down by clamour; he was sustained by the fervour of his convictions, and it was too late for remonstrance. His lectures had all been carefully prepared, and he went steadily on with them. The unusual charge of dullness, which had been made against some pa.s.sages in his opening discourse, was never made again. The lectures became a leading topic of conversation, and a subject of fierce attack. Without fear, and in defiance of his critics, he dashed into the reign of Henry VIII., "the English Blue Beard, whom I have been accused of attempting to whitewash." "I have no particular veneration for kings," he said. "The English Liturgy speaks of them officially as most religious and gracious. They have been, I suppose, as religious and gracious as other men, neither more nor less. The chief difference is that we know more of kings than we know of other men." Henry had a short way with absentees. He took away their Irish estates, "and gave them to others who would reside and attend to their work. It would have been confiscation doubtless," beyond the power of American Congress, though not of a British Parliament. "If in later times there had been more such confiscations, Ireland would not have been the worse for it." Here, then, Froude was on the side of the Irish. Here, as always, he was under the influence of Carlyle. His ideal form of government was an enlightened despotism, with a ruler drawn after the pattern of children"s story-books, who would punish the wicked and reward the good. Froude never consciously defended injustice, or tampered with the truth. His faults were of the opposite kind. He could not help speaking out the whole truth as it appeared to him, without regard for time, place, or expediency. If he could have defended England without attacking Ireland, all would have been well, but he could not do it. For his defence of England, stated simply, was that Ireland had always been, and still remained, incapable of managing her own affairs. "Free nations, gentlemen, are not made by playing at insurrection. If Ireland desires to be a nation, she must learn not merely to shout for liberty, but to fight for it" against a bigger nation with a standing army in which many Irishmen were enlisted. The Irish are a sensitive as well as a generous race; and they feel taunts as much as more substantial wrongs. When the first British statesman of his time, not a Roman Catholic, nor, as the Irish would have said, a Catholic at all, had denounced the upas, or poison, tree of Protestant ascendency, and had cut off its two princ.i.p.al branches, Froude wasted his breath in telling the American Irish, or the American people, that Gladstone did not know what he was talking about. The Irish Church Act, the Irish Land Act, the release of the Fenians, appealed to them as honest measures of justice and conciliation. There was nothing conciliatory in Froude"s language, and they did not think it just. From the purely historical point of view he had much to say for himself, as, for instance:
"The Papal cause in Europe in the sixteenth century, take it for all in all, was the cause of stake and gibbet, inquisition, dungeons, and political tyranny. It did not lose its character because in Ireland it a.s.sumed the accidental form of the defence of the freedom of opinion."
Perhaps not. Ireland, for good or for evil, was connected with England, and when England was at war with the Pope she was at war with him in Ireland as elsewhere. The argument, however, is double- edged. The Papal cause being no longer, for various reasons, the cause of stake and gibbet, how could there be the same ground for restricting freedom of opinion in Ireland, for pa.s.sing Coercion Acts, for refusing Home Rule? As Froude himself said, "Popery now has its teeth drawn. It can bark, but it can no longer bite." "The Irish generally," he went on, "were rather superst.i.tious than religious." These. are delicate distinctions. "The Bishop of Peterborough must understand," said John Bright on a famous occasion, "that I believe in holy earth as little as he believes in holy water." Elizabeth"s Irish policy was to take advantage of local factions, and to maintain English supremacy by setting them against each other. "The result was hideous. The forty-five glorious years of Elizabeth were to Ireland years of unremitting wretchedness." n.o.body could complain that Froude spared the English Government. If he had been writing history, or rather when he was writing it, the mutual treachery of the Irish could not be pa.s.sed over. "Alas and shame for Ireland," said Froude in New York. "Not then only, but many times before and after, the same plan [offer of pardon to murderous traitors] was tried, and was never known to fail. Brother brought in the dripping head of brother, son of father, comrade of comrade. I pardon none, said an English commander, until they have imbued their hands in blood." The revival of such horrors on a public platform could serve no useful purpose. They could not be pleaded as an apology for England, and they inflamed, instead of soothing, the animosities which Froude professed himself anxious to allay. Yet he never lost sight of justice. On Elizabeth he had no mercy. He made her responsible for the slaughter of men, women, and children by her officers, for first neglecting her duties as ruler, and then putting down rebellion by a.s.sa.s.sination. The plantation of Ulster by "James I., and the accompanying forfeiture of Catholic estates, he defended on the ground that only the idle rich were dispossessed. This is of course socialism pure and simple. James I."s own excuse was that Tyrone and Tyrconnell, who owned the greater part of Ulster between them, had been implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. If they were, the loss of their lands was a very mild penalty indeed.
On the rebellion of 1641, which led to Cromwell"s terrible retribution, Froude touched lightly. Although the number of Protestants who perished in the ma.s.sacre has been exaggerated, the attempts of Catholic historians to deny it, or explain it away, are futile. Sir William Petty"s figure of 38,000 is as well authenticated as any. Froude of course justifies Cromwell for putting, eight years afterwards, the garrisons of Drogheda and Wexford to the sword. His characteristic intrepidity was never more fully shown than in these appeals to American opinion against the Irish race and creed. Unfortunately the practical result of them was the reverse of what he intended. He preached the gospel of force. Thus he expressed it in reply to Cromwell"s critics: "I say frankly, that I believe the control of human things in this world is given to the strong, and those who cannot hold their own ground with all advantage on their side must bear the Consequences of their weakness." The Holy Inquisition, might have used this language in Italy or in Spain. Any tyrant might use it at any time. It was denied in antic.i.p.ation by an older and higher authority than Carlyle in the words "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." There is a better morality, if indeed there be a worse, than reverence for big battalions.
Sceptre and crown Must topple down, And in the earth be equal made With the poor crooked scythe and spade; Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.
Froude seldom did things by halves, and his apology for Cromwell is not half-hearted. He applauds the celebrated p.r.o.nouncement, "I meddle with no man"s conscience; but if you mean by liberty of conscience, liberty to have the ma.s.s, that will not be suffered where the Parliament of England has power." A great deal has happened since Cromwell"s time, and the ma.s.s is no longer the symbol of intolerance, if only because the Church of Rome has no power to persecute. Cromwell would have had a short shrift if he had fallen into the hands of ma.s.s-goers. To tolerate intolerance is a Christian duty, and therefore possible for an individual. Whether it was possible for the Lord General in 1650 is a question hardly suited for popular treatment on a public platform. All that he did was right in Froude"s eyes, including the prescription of "h.e.l.l or Connaught" for "the men whose trade was fighting, who had called themselves lords of the soil," and the abolition of the Irish Parliament. "I as an Englishman," said Froude, "honour Cromwell and glory in him as the greatest statesman and soldier our race has produced. In the matter we have now in hand I consider him to have been the best friend, in the best sense, to all that was good in Ireland." This is of course an opinion which can honestly be held. But to the Irish race all over the world such language is an irritating defiance, and they simply would not listen to any man who used it.
The expulsion of Presbyterians under Charles II. was foolish as well as cruel, for it deprived the English Government in Ireland of their best friends, and supplied the American colonies with some of their staunchest soldiers in the War of Independence. Enough were left, however, to immortalise the siege of Derry, while the native Irish failed to distinguish themselves, or, in plain English, ran away, at the Battle of the Boyne, and the defeat of James II. was recognised by the Treaty of Limerick. An exclusively Protestant, Parliament was accompanied by such toleration as the Catholics had enjoyed under Charles II. The infamous law against the Irish trade in wool and the episcopal persecution of Nonconformists, were condemned in just and forcible terms by Froude. Episcopal shortcomings seldom escaped his vigilant eye. "I believe," he said, "Bishops have produced more mischief in this world than any cla.s.s of officials that have ever been invented." The pet.i.tion of the Irish Parliament for union with England in 1703 was refused, madly refused, Froude thought; Protestant Dissenters were treated as harshly as Catholics, and the commercial regulations of the eighteenth century were such that smuggling thrived better than any other trade. The country was pillaged by absent landlords, and "the mere hint of an absentee tax was sufficient to throw the younger Pitt into convulsions." The Irish Protestant Bishops provoked the savage satire of Swift, who doubted not that excellent men had been appointed, and only deplored that they should be personated by scoundrels who had murdered them on Hounslow Heath.
These lectures stung the Irish to the quick, and gave much embarra.s.sment to Froude"s American friends. The Irish found a powerful champion in Father Burke, the Dominican friar, who had been a popular preacher at Rome, and with an audience of his own Catholic countrymen was irresistible. Burke was not a well informed man, and his knowledge of history was derived from Catholic handbooks. But the occasion did not call for dry facts. Froude had not been pa.s.sionless, and what the Irish wanted in reply was the rhetorical eloquence which to the Father was second nature. Burke, however, had the good taste and good sense to acknowledge that Froude suffered from nothing worse than the invincible prejudice which all Catholics attribute to all Protestants. As a Protestant and an Englishman, Froude could not be expected to give such a history of Ireland as would be agreeable to Irishmen. "Yet to the honour of this learned gentleman be it said that he frankly avows the injuries which have been done, and that he comes nearer than any man whom I have ever heard to the real root of the remedy to be applied to these evils." When his handling of doc.u.mentary evidence was criticised, Froude repeated his challenge to the editor of The Sat.u.r.day Review, which had never been taken up, and on that point the American sense of fair play gave judgment in his favour. But how was public opinion to p.r.o.nounce upon such a subject as the alleged Bull of Adrian II., granting Ireland to Henry II of England? The Bull was not in existence, and Burke boldly denied that it had ever existed at all. Froude maintained that its existence and its nature were proved by later Bulls of succeeding Popes. The matter had no interest for Protestants, and the American press regarded it as a bore. Burke had more success with the rebellion of 1641, and the Cromwellian ma.s.sacres of Such 1649. Such topics cannot be exhaustively treated in part of a single lecture, and Burke could not be expected to put the slaughter of true believers on a level with irregular justice roughly wreaked upon heretics. The combat was not so much unequal as impossible. There was no common groud. Froude could be fair to an eminent especially if he were a Protestant. His panegyric on Grattan deserves to be quoted alike for its eloquence and its justice. "In those singular labyrinths of intrigue and treachery," meaning the secret correspondence at the Castle, "I have found Irishmen whose names stand fair enough in patriotic history concerned in transactions that show them knaves and scoundrels; but I never found stain nor shadow of stain on the reputation of Henry Grattan. I say nothing of the temptations to which he was exposed. There were no honours with which England would not have decorated him; there was no price so high that England would not have paid to have silenced or subsidised him. He was one of those perfectly disinterested men who do not feel temptations of this kind. They pa.s.sed by him and over him without giving him even the pains to turn his back on them. In every step of his life he was governed simply and fairly by what he conceived to be the interest of his country." Grattan"s Parliament, as we all know, nearly perished in a dispute about the Regency, and finally disappeared after the rebellion of 1798. It gave the Catholics votes in 1793, though no Catholic ever sat within its walls. Grattan, according to Froude, was led astray by the "delirium of nationality," and the true Irish statesman of his time was Chancellor Fitzgibbon, Lord Clare, whose name is only less abhorred by Irish Nationalists than Cromwell"s own. Americans did not think nationality a delirium, and their ideal of statesmanship was not represented by Lord Clare.
The fifth and last of Froude"s American lectures was reprinted in Short Studies with the t.i.tle of "Ireland since the Union."* It has a closer bearing upon current politics than the others, and it runs counter to American as well as to Irish sentiment. "Suppose in any community two-thirds who are cowards vote one way, and the remaining third will not only vote, but fight the other way." The argument has often been used against woman"s suffrage. One obvious answer is that women, like men, would vote on different sides. In a community where two-thirds of the adult male population were cowards problems of government would doubtless a.s.sume a secondary importance, and that there are limits to the power of majorities no sane Const.i.tutionalist denies.
- * Vol. ii. pp, 515-598. -
Short of making Carlyle Dictator of the Universe, Froude suggested no alternative to the ballot-box of civilised life. This last lecture, however, is chiefly remarkable for the rare tribute which it pays to the services of the Catholic priesthood. Father Burke himself must have been melted when he read, "Ireland is one of the poorest countries in Europe. There is less theft, less cheating, less house-breaking, less robbery of all sorts, than in any country of the same size in the world. In the wild district where I lived we slept with unlocked door and open windows, with as much security as if we had been-I will not say in London or New York, I should be sorry to try the experiment in either place: I will say as if we had been among the saints in Paradise. In the sixteenth century the Irish were notoriously regardless of what is technically morality. For the last hundred years at least impurity has been almost unknown in Ireland. And this absence of vulgar crime, and this exceptional delicacy and modesty of character, are due alike, to their ever- lasting honour, to the influence of the Catholic clergy." That is the testimony of an opponent, and it is emphatic testimony indeed. To O"Connell Froude is again conspicuously unjust, and his remark that "a few attacks on handfuls of the police, or the blowing in of the walls of an English prison ... will not overturn an Empire" is open to the observation that they disestablished a Church. When Froude came to practical politics, he always seemed to be "moving about in worlds not realised." His statement that national education in Ireland was the best that existed in any part of the Empire almost takes one"s breath away, and the idea that no Irish legislature would have pa.s.sed the Land Act is a strange fantasy indeed. Whether an Irish Parliament could be trusted to deal fairly by the landlords is an open question. That it would fail to consider the interests of the tenants is unthinkable. Froude was on much firmer ground when he employed the case of Protestant Ulster, the Ulster of the Plantation, as an argument against Home Rule. Those Protestants would, he said, fight rather than submit to a Catholic majority, and England could not a.s.sent to shooting them down. There is only one real answer to this objection, and that is that Protestant Ulster would do nothing of the kind. A logical method of reconciling contradictory prophecies has never been found. In 1872 Home Rule had no support in England, and even in Ireland the electors were pretty equally divided. Froude did not lay hold of the American mind, as he might have done, by showing the inapplicability of the Federal System which suits the United States to the circ.u.mstances of the United Kingdom.
The impression made by Froude upon his audiences in New York is graphically described by an American reporter.
"Mr. Froude improved very much in delivery and manner during this course of lectures .... In his earlier lectures his ways were awkward, his speech was too rapid, and he did not know what in world to do with his hands. It was quite to see him run them under his coat tails, spread them across his shirt front, stick them in his breeches pockets, twirl them in the arm-holes his vest, or hold them behind his back. He has now found out how to dispose of them in a more or less natural way. His delivery is less rapid, his voice better modulated, and his enunciation more distinct .... One of his most effective peculiarities, in inviting the attention of his hearers, is the exceeding earnestness of the manner of his address. This earnestness is not like that of rant. It is the result of his own strong conviction and his desire to impress others." That is a fair and unprejudiced estimate of Froude as he appeared to a trained observer who took neither side in the dispute. Many Irishmen shook hands with him, and thanked him for his plain speaking. Bret Harte told him that even those who dissented most widely from his opinions admired his "grit." But politicians had to think of the Irish vote, and the proprietors of newspapers could not ignore their Catholic subscribers. The priests worked against him with such effect that Mr. Peabody"s servants in Boston, who were Irish Catholics, threatened to leave their places if Froude remained as a guest in their master"s house. Father Burke, who had begun politely enough, became obstreperous and abusive. Froude"s life was in danger, and he was put under the special protection of the police. The English newspapers, except The Pall Mall Gazette, gave him no support, and The Times treated his enterprise as Quixotic. A preposterous rumour that he received payment from the British Ministry obtained circulation among respectable persons in New York. He had intended to visit the Western States, but the project was abandoned in consequence of growing Irish hostility which made him feel that further effort would be useless. It was not that he thought his arguments refuted, or capable of refutation. He had considered them too long, and too carefully, for that. But the well had been poisoned. The malicious imputation of bribery was caught up by the more credulous Irish, and their priests warned them that they would do wrong in listening to a heretic. As for the American people, they had no mind to take up the quarrel. It was no business of theirs.
Some extracts from Froude"s letters to his wife will show how much he enjoyed American hospitality, and how far he appreciated American character. "I was received on Sat.u.r.day," he wrote from New York on the 4th of October, 1872, "as a member of the Lotus Club-the wits and journalists of New York. It was the strangest scene I ever was present at. They were very clever-very witty at each other"s expense, very complimentary to me; and, believe me, they worked the publishers who were present for the profit they were making out of me." He was agreeably surprised by the merchant princes of New York. "There is absolutely no vulgarity about them. They are immensely rich, but simple, and rather elaborately "religious" in the forms of their lives. A very long grace is always said before dinner. In this and many ways they are totally unlike what I expected." Again, after a description of Cornell"s University, he says, "There is Mr. Cornell, who has made all this, living in a little poky house in a street with a couple of maids, his wife and daughters dressed in the homeliest manner. His name will be remembered for centuries as having spent his wealth in the very best inst.i.tutions on which a country"s prosperity depends. Our people spend their fortunes in buying great landed estates to found and perpetuate their own family. I wonder which name will last the longest, Mr. Cornell"s or Lord Overstone"s." "There is no such thing," he says elsewhere, "as founding a family, and those who save good fortunes have to give them to the public when they die for want of a better use to put them to."
With sincerely religious people, especially if they were Evangelicals, Froude felt deep sympathy. Patronage of religion he detested, most of all the form of it which prescribes religion for other people. An American philosopher called, and told him that, having failed to find a new creed, he thought the old superst.i.tions had better be kept up, Popery for choice. "This," remarks Froude, "is what I call want of faith. If you can believe that what you are convinced is a lie may nevertheless exert a wholesome moral influence on people, and that, whether true or not, or rather though certainly not true, it is good to be preserved and taken up with, you are to all practical purposes an atheist."
While he was at Boston Froude saw a great fire, and his description of it is hardly inferior to the best things in his best books. He was staying with George Peabody, equally well known in England and the United States as a philanthropist, "one of the sweetest and gentlest of beings." "As we were sitting after dinner, the children said there was a fire somewhere. They heard the alarm bell, and saw a red light in the sky. Presently we saw flames. Mr. Peabody was uneasy, and I walked out with him to see. Between the house here and the town lies the Common or City Park. As we crossed this, the signs became more ominous. We made our way into the princ.i.p.al street through the crowd, and then, looking down a cross street full of enormous warehouses, saw both sides of it in flames. The streets were full of steam fire-engines, all roaring and playing, but the houses were so high and large, and the volumes of fire so prodigious, that their water-jets looked like so many squirts. As we stood, we saw the fire grow. Block caught after block. I myself saw one magnificent store catch at the lower windows. In a few seconds the flame ran up storey after storey, spouting out at the different landings as it rose. It reached the roof with a spring, and the place was gone. There was nothing to stop it. Our people were sure that it would be another Chicago. The night was fine and frosty, with a light north-easterly breeze against which the fire was advancing. We stayed an hour or two. There seemed no danger for Mr. Peabody"s bank. He was evidently, however, extremely hara.s.sed and anxious, as he held the bonds of innumerable merchants whose property was being destroyed. I thought I was in his way, and left him, and came home to tell the family what was going on. After I left the fire travelled faster than ever. Huge rolls of smoke swelled up fold after fold. The under folds crimson and glowing yellow from the flames below, sparks flying up like rocket stars. A petroleum store caught, and the flames ran about in rivers, and above all the steel blue moon shone through the rents of the rolling vapour, and the stars with an intensity of brilliant calm such as we never see in England. It was a night to be eternally remembered."
A great many Irish families were made homeless by this fire, and Froude subscribed seven hundred dollars for their relief, thereby encouraging the rumour that he was in the pay of the British Minister whom he disliked and distrusted most. Froude"s final view of America and Americans was in some respects less favourable than his first impressions. He was struck by the difference between their public and private treatment of himself, between their conversation and the articles in their press. "From what I see of the Eastern States I do not antic.i.p.ate any very great things as likely to come out of the Americans. Their physical frames seem hung together rather than organically grown .... They are generous with their money, have much tenderness and quiet good feeling; but the Anglo- Saxon power is running to seed, and I don"t think will revive. Puritanism is dead, and the collected sternness of temperament which belonged to it is dead also."
This language seems strange, written as it was only seven years after the great war. Froude, however, considered that there was much hysterical pa.s.sion in the policy of the North, and he shared Carlyle"s dislike of democratic inst.i.tutions. Moreover, he was disappointed with the result of his mission. The case seemed so clear to him that he could not understand why it should seem less clear to others. He believed that if the priests could have been driven out of Ireland by William of Orange, the more fanatical Catholics would have followed them, and Ireland would have become prosperous, contented, and loyal. To an American Republican such ideas were as repugnant as they were to an Irish Catholic. An American could understand the argument that Home Rule was impracticable, because a Federal Const.i.tution did not apply to the circ.u.mstances of the United Kingdom. He would not readily believe that the Irish were by nature incapable of self-government, or that Englishmen must know better what was good for them than they knew themselves. For Cromwell he could make allowance. The Protector had to deal with a Catholicism which would have made an end of him and restored Charles II. But times had changed. Catholics had abandoned persecution, and ought not to be punished the sins of their fathers. The Irish did not claim, as the Southern States had claimed, the right to secede, but to exercise the powers inherent in every State of the American Union.
Carlyle warmly approved of Froude"s undertaking, and persisted in believing that it had done good by forcing the American public to see that there were two sides to the historic question, an English side as well as an Irish one. He was so far right, and with that qualified success Froude had to be content. His champion, whose opinion was more to him than any other, than any number of others, wrote to Mrs. Froude on the 5th of December, 1872: "The rest of the affair, all that loud whirlwind of Bully Burke, Sat.u.r.day Review and Co., both at home and abroad, I take to be, in essence, absolutely nothing; and to deserve from him no more regard than the barking of dogs, or the braying of a.s.ses. He may depend on it, what he is saying about Ireland is the genuine truth, or the nearest to it that has ever been said by any person whatever; and I hope he knows long ere this (if he likes to consider it) that the truth alone is anything, and all the circ.u.mambient balderdash and whirlwinds of nonsense tumbling round it are, and eternally remain, nothing. Tell him I have read his book, and know others that have read it with attention; and that their and my clear opinion is as above. To myself there is a ring in it as of clear steel; and my prophecy is that all the roaring blockheads of the world cannot prevent its natural effect on human souls. Sooner or later all persons will have to believe it." Carlyle seldom qualified his approval, and his earnest advocacy was to Froude a recompense beyond all price.
The first volume of Froude"s English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, to which Carlyle refers, had been published at home while the author was lecturing on the Irish question to the people of the United States. Like the lectures, on a more thorough and comprehensive scale, it is a bold indictment of the Irish nation. Froude could not write without a purpose, nor forget that he was an Englishman and a Protestant. Before he had finished a single chapter of his new book he had stated in uncompromising language his opinion of the Irish race. "Pa.s.sionate in everything-pa.s.sionate in their patriotism, pa.s.sionate in their religion, pa.s.sionately courageous, pa.s.sionately loyal and affectionate-they are without the manliness which would give strength and solidity to the sentimental part of their dispositions; while the surface and show is so seductive and winning that only experience of its instability can resist its charm."* Such summary judgments are seldom accurate. Every one must be acquainted with individual Irishmen who do not correspond with Froude"s general description. Nor does Froude always take into account the shrewdness, the humour, the genius for politics, which have distinguished Irishmen throughout the world. Impressed with this view of the Irish character, he held that forbearance in dealing with Irish rebellions was misplaced, that Irishmen respected only an authority with which they durst not trifle, and that universal confiscation should have followed the defeat of Shan O"Neill.
- * Vol. i, pp. 21, 22, -
These, however, were preliminary matters. When he came to the eighteenth century Froude had to consider details, and here his prejudice against Catholicism led him astray. In the reign of George II. acts of lawless violence were not uncommon on this side of the Channel, and Richardson"s Clarissa was read with a credulity which showed that abduction could be committed without being followed by punishment. In parts of Ireland it was not an infrequent offence, and Froude collected some abominable cases, which he described in his picturesque way.* As examples of disregard for humanity, and contempt for law, he was fully justified in citing them. But he endeavoured to throw responsibility for these outrages on the Roman Catholic Church. "Young gentlemen," he says, "of the Catholic persuasion were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the lands of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of recovering souls at the same time by carrying off young Protestant girls of fortune to the mountains, ravishing them with the most exquisite brutality, and then compelling them to go through a form of marriage, which a priest was always in attendance ready to celebrate."+ This is a very serious charge, perhaps as serious a charge as could well be made against a religious communion. It was an accusation improbable on the face of it; for while the Church of Rome in the course of her strange, eventful history has tampered with the sixth commandment, as Protestants call it, she has never underrated the virtue of chast.i.ty, and has always proclaimed a high standard of s.e.xual morals. In his zeal to justify the penal laws against Catholics Froude accepted without sufficient inquiry evidence which could only have satisfied one willing to believe the worst.
- * English in Ireland, vol. i. pp. 417-434.
+ Ibid., p. 417.