Catholics of his own time were mild, honourable, and loyal. Although
they had been relieved of their disabilities, they had no power.
Froude's reading and reflection led him to infer that when the
Church was powerful it aimed a deadly blow at English independence,
and that Henry VIII., with all his moral failings, was entitled to
the credit of averting it. These opinions were not new. They were
held by most people when Froude was a boy. It was from Oxford that
an attack upon them came, and from Oxford came also, in the person
of Froude, their champion.

Froude's historical work took at first the form of essays, chiefly
in The Westminster Review and Fraser's Magazine. The Rolls Series of
State Papers had not then begun, and the reign of Henry was
imperfectly understood. Froude was especially attracted by the age
of Elizabeth, who admired her father as a monarch, whatever she may
have thought of him as a man. It was an age of mighty dramatists, of
divine poets, of statesmen wise and magnanimous, if not great, of
seamen who made England, not Spain, the ruler of the seas. It was
with the seamen that Froude began. His essay on England's Forgotten
Worthies, which appeared in The Westminster Review for 1852, was
suggested by a new, and very bad, edition of Hakluyt. It inspired
Kingsley with the idea of his historical novel, Westward Ho! and
Tennyson drew from it, many years later, the story of his noble
poem, The Revenge. The eloquence is splendid, and the patriotic
fervour stirs the blood like the sound of a trumpet. The cruelties
of the Spaniards in South America, perpetrated in the name of Holy
Church, are described with unflinching fidelity and unsparing truth.
For instance, four hundred French Huguenots were massacred in cold
blood by Spaniards, who invaded their settlement in Florida at a
time when France was at peace with Spain. These Protestants were