revolt against ecclesiastical power would continue if every priest submitted.  “The Reformation,” said Froude at the beginning of his first course, in November, 1892, “is the hinge on which all modern history turns.”  He traced in it the rise of England’s greatness.  When he came back in his old age to Oxford, it was to sound the trumpet-note of private judgment and religious liberty, as if the Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholic revival had never been.  Froude could not be indifferent to the moral side of historical questions, or accept the doctrine that every one is right from his own point of view.  The Reformation did in his eyes determine that men were responsible to God alone, and not to priests or Churches, for their opinions and their deeds.  It also decided that the Church must be subordinate to the State, not the State to the Church.  This is called Erastianism, and is the bugbear of High Churchmen.  But there is no escape from the alternative, and the Church of Rome has never abandoned her claim to universal authority.  Against it Henry viii. and Cromwell, Elizabeth and Cecil, set up the supremacy of the law, made and administered by laymen.  As Froude said at the close of his first course, in the Hilary Term of 1893, “the principles on which the laity insisted have become the rule of the modern Popes no longer depose Princes, dispense with oaths, or absolve subjects from their allegiance.  Appeals are not any more carried to Rome from the national tribunals, nor justice sold there to the highest bidder.”  Justice was sold at Rome before the existence of the Catholic Church, or even the Christian religion.  It has been sold, as Hugh Latimer testified, in England herself.  But with the English Court’s independence of the Holy See came the principles of civil and religious freedom.

Few things annoyed Froude more than the attacks of Macaulay and other Liberals on Cranmer.  This was not merely sentimental attachment on Froude’s part to the compiler of the Prayer Book.  He looked on the Marian Martyrs as the precursors of the Long Parliament and of the Revolution, the champions of liberty in church and State.  He would have felt that he was doing less than his duty if he had taught his pupils mere facts.  Those facts had a lesson, for them as well as for him, and his sense of what the lesson was had deepened with years.  He had observed in his own day an event which made much the same impression upon him as study of the French Revolution had made upon Carlyle.  When the Second Empire perished at Sedan, Froude saw in the catastrophe the judgment of Providence upon a sinister and tortuous career.  If the duty of an historian be to exclude moral considerations, Froude did not fulfil it.  That there were good men on the wrong side he perceived plainly enough.  But that did not make it the right side, nor confuse the difference between the two.