to be the greatest and most beneficent change in modern history.  He believed the English race to be the finest in the world.  He disbelieved in equality, and in Parliamentary government.  Essentially an aristocrat in the proper sense of the term, he cherished the doctrine of submission to a few fit persons, qualified for authority by training and experience.  These ideas run through all Froude’s historical writing, which takes from them its trend and colour.  Whatever else the male Tudors may have been, they were emphatically men; and even Elizabeth, whom Froude did not love, had a commanding spirit.  Except poor priest-ridden Mary, who had a Spanish mother and a Spanish husband, they did not brook control, and no one was ever more conscious of being a king than Henry viii.  To him, as to Elizabeth, the Reformation was not dogmatic but practical, the subjection of the Church to the State.  The struggle between Pope and sovereign had to be fought out before the struggle between sovereign and Parliament could begin.

Liberals thought that Froude would not have been on the side of the Parliament, and they joined High Churchmen in attacking him.  Spiritual and democratic power were to him equally obnoxious.  He delighted in Plato’s simile of the ship, where the majority are nothing, and the captain rules.  His opinions were not popular, except his dislike for the Church of Rome.  He is read partly for his exquisite diction, and partly for the patriotic fervour with which he rejoices in the achievements of England, especially on sea.

Rossetti’s fine burden: 

Lands are swayed by a king on a throne,
The sea hath no king but God alone: 

might be a motto for the title-page of Froude.  The fallacy that brilliant writers are superficial accounts for much of the prejudice in academic circles against which Froude had to contend.  To him of all men it was inapplicable, for no historian studied original documents with greater zest.  That he did not know his period nobody could pretend.  He knew it so much better than his critics that few of them could even criticise him intelligently.  That he was not thoroughly acquainted with the periods preceding his own may be more plausibly argued.  There must of course be some limit.  The siege of Troy can be told without mention of Leda’s egg.  But if Froude had given a little more time to Henry VII., and all that followed the Battle of Bosworth, he would have approached the fall of Wolsey and the rise of Cromwell with a more thorough understanding of cause and effect.  His mind moved with great rapidity, and went so directly to the point that the circumstances were not always fully weighed.  It is possible to see the truth too clearly, without allowance for drawbacks and qualifications.  The important fact about Henry, for instance, is that he was a statesman who had to provide for a peaceful succession.  But he was also a wilful, headstrong, arbitrary man, spoiled from his cradle by flatterers, and determined