against the persecutor is the secular power. Mr. Spurgeon once
excited great applause from members of his Church by declaring that
the Baptists had never persecuted. When the cheers had subsided he
explained that it was because they had never had a chance. Froude
was convinced that ecclesiastics could not be trusted, and that they
would oppress the laity unless the laity muzzled them. He held that
the reformers had been calumniated, that their services were in
danger of being forgotten, and that the modern attempt to ignore the
Reformation was not only unhistorical, but disingenuous. He wrote
partly to rehabilitate them, and partly to prove that Henry VIII.
had conferred great benefits upon England by his repudiation of
Papal authority. He took, as he considered it his duty to take, the
side of individual liberty against ecclesiastical authority, and of
England against Rome. The idea that an historian was to have no
opinions of his own, or that, having them, he was to conceal them,
never entered his mind.

That Froude had any prejudice against the Church of England as such
is a baseless fancy. He believed in the Church of his childhood,
and, unless the word be used in the narrow sense of the clerical
profession, he never left it to the end of his days. It was to him,
as it was to his father, a Protestant Church, out of communion with
Rome, cut off from the Pope and his court by the great upheaval of
the sixteenth century. It is unreasonable, and indeed foolish, to
say that that opinion disqualified him to be the historian of Henry
VIII., and Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth. The Catholicism of Lingard is
not considered to be a disqualification by sensible Protestants.
Froude's faults as an historian were of a different kind, and had
nothing to do with his ecclesiastical views. He was not the only
Erastian, nor was he an Erastian pure and simple. He has left it on