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 principal 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 assumed the accidental form of the defence of the freedom of opinion.”