Froude settled steadily down to work, dividing his time between London and Devonshire.  Shooting and fishing had for the time to be dropped.  For recreation he joined an archery club, where, as James Spedding told him, you were always sure of your game.  In after life Froude, who never bore malice, used to say that his father had been right in leaving him to his own resources, and that the necessity of providing for himself was, in his instance, as in so many others, the foundation of his career.  He owed much to his publisher, John Parker, who was liberal, generous, and confiding.  Publishers, like mothers-in-law, have got a bad name from bad jokes.  Parker, by trusting Froude, and relieving him from anxiety while he wrote, smoothed the way for a memorable contribution to English history which after many vicissitudes has now an established place as a work of genius and research.

The principles on which he worked are explained in a contribution to the volume of Oxford Essays for the year 1855.  The subject of this brilliant though forgotten paper is the best means of teaching English history, and the author’s judgments upon modern historians are peculiar.  Hume and Hallam, the latter of whom was still living, are indiscriminately condemned.  Macaulay, whose first two volumes were already famous, is ignored.  The Oxford examiners are severely censured for prescribing Campbell’s Lives of the Chancellors as authoritative, and Carlyle’s Cromwell, a collection of materials rather than a book, is pronounced to be the one good modern history, though Froude denounces, with friendly candour, Carlyle’s “distempered antagonism to the prevailing fashions of the age.”  The most characteristic part of this essay, however, is that which recommends the Statutes, with their preambles, as the best text-book, and the following passage would be confidently assigned by most critics to the History itself: 

“Who now questions, to mention an extreme instance, that Anne Boleyn’s death was the result of the licentious caprice of Henry? and yet her own father, the Earl of Wiltshire, her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, the hero of Flodden Field, the Privy Council, the House of Lords, the Archbishop and Bishopsm, the House of Commons, the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and three other juries, assented without, as far as we know, an opposing voice, to the proofs of her guilt, and approved of the execution of the sentence against her.”

Froude was not, however, so much absorbed in the work of his life that he could not form and express strong opinions upon the great events passing around him.  His view of the Russian war and of the French alliance was set forth with much plainness of speech in a letter to Max Muller:*