Long Parliament, the best ever assembled in England, would have
given up the cause of the Civil War if it had not been for Cromwell
and the army. Although he had been one of Peel's warmest supporters
in 1846, he had come to dread Liberalism as tending towards anarchy,
and he adopted the singular verbal fallacy that a low franchise
would mean a low standard of politics. Froude, though he still
called himself a Liberal, and in some respects always was so, swore
by Carlyle, acknowledged him as his master, and repeated his creed.
Carlyle had many admirers, but few disciples, and he naturally set
great value on Froude's adhesion. He had always a great contempt for
universal suffrage. It would have given, he said grimly, the same
voice in the government of Palestine to Jesus Christ and to Judas
Iscariot. But whatever might have happened to Judas, the Son of man
had not where to lay His head, and would certainly have been
excluded under any system which met the approval of Carlyle. In
Latter-Day Pamphlets Carlyle had made a tremendous attack upon
Downing Street, and the administrative deficiencies which the
Crimean campaign disclosed could be treated as confirmatory evidence
in his favour. As a matter of fact, Lord Aberdeen and Lord
Palmerston were all the same to him. He was denouncing the
Parliamentary system, which has borne up against worse Ministers
than the Duke of Newcastle. If Sebastopol had been taken after the
Alma, as it well might have been, Carlyle would not have altered his
tone. Nothing would have prevented him from delivering his message,
or Froude from accepting it.

The first two volumes of the History appeared in 1856. They dealt
with the latter part of Henry's reign, when he had rid himself of
Wolsey, and was personally ruling England with the aid of Thomas
Cromwell. Froude had to describe the dissolution of the monasteries,