Although Froude enjoyed with avidity the conversation of his chosen friends, he was not satisfied with intellectual epicureanism.  He was resolved to make for himself a name, to leave behind him some not unworthy memorial.  The history of the Reformation attracted him strongly.  If an historian is a man of science, or a mere chronicler, then certainly Froude was not an historian.  He made no claim to be impartial.  He held that the Oxford Movement was not only endangering the National Church, but injuring the national character and corrupting men’s knowledge of the past.  He believed in the Reformation first as an historic fact, and secondly as a beneficent revolt of the laity against clerical dominion.  He denied that since the Reformation there had been one Catholic Church, and as an Englishman he asserted in the language of the Articles that the Bishop of Rome had no jurisdiction within this realm of England.  He wanted to vindicate the reformers, and to prove that in the struggle against Papal Supremacy English patriots took the side of the king.  He was roused to indignation by slanders against the character of Elizabeth; and he held, as almost every one now holds, that the attempt to make an innocent saint of Mary Stuart was futile.  Even More and Fisher he refused to accept as candidates for the crown of martyrdom.  They were both excellent men.  More was, in some respects, a great man.  They were certainly far more virtuous than the king who put them to death.  But they were executed for treason, not for heresy, and to clear their memory it is necessary to show that they had no part in conspiring with a foreign Power against their lawful sovereign.  That Power, the Church of Rome, a Power till 1870, Froude cordially hated.  He regarded it as an obstacle to progress, an enemy of freedom, an enslaver of the intellect and the soul.  The English Catholics of his own time were mild, honourable, and loyal.  Although they had been relieved of their disabilities, they had no power.  Froude’s reading and reflection led him to infer that when the Church was powerful it aimed a deadly blow at English independence, and that Henry viii., with all his moral failings, was entitled to the credit of averting it.  These opinions were not new.  They were held by most people when Froude was a boy.  It was from Oxford that an attack upon them came, and from Oxford came also, in the person of Froude, their champion.

Froude’s historical work took at first the form of essays, chiefly in The Westminster Review and Fraser’s Magazine.  The Rolls Series of State Papers had not then begun, and the reign of Henry was imperfectly understood.  Froude was especially attracted by the age of Elizabeth, who admired her father as a monarch, whatever she may have thought of him as a man.  It was an age of mighty dramatists, of divine poets, of statesmen wise and magnanimous, if not great, of seamen who made England, not Spain, the ruler of the seas.  It was with the seamen that Froude