had been shaken by reflecting that the Long Parliament, the best ever assembled in England, would have given up the cause of the Civil War if it had not been for Cromwell and the army.  Although he had been one of Peel’s warmest supporters in 1846, he had come to dread Liberalism as tending towards anarchy, and he adopted the singular verbal fallacy that a low franchise would mean a low standard of politics.  Froude, though he still called himself a Liberal, and in some respects always was so, swore by Carlyle, acknowledged him as his master, and repeated his creed.  Carlyle had many admirers, but few disciples, and he naturally set great value on Froude’s adhesion.  He had always a great contempt for universal suffrage.  It would have given, he said grimly, the same voice in the government of Palestine to Jesus Christ and to Judas Iscariot.  But whatever might have happened to Judas, the Son of man had not where to lay His head, and would certainly have been excluded under any system which met the approval of Carlyle.  In Latter-Day Pamphlets Carlyle had made a tremendous attack upon Downing Street, and the administrative deficiencies which the Crimean campaign disclosed could be treated as confirmatory evidence in his favour.  As a matter of fact, Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston were all the same to him.  He was denouncing the Parliamentary system, which has borne up against worse Ministers than the Duke of Newcastle.  If Sebastopol had been taken after the Alma, as it well might have been, Carlyle would not have altered his tone.  Nothing would have prevented him from delivering his message, or Froude from accepting it.

The first two volumes of the History appeared in 1856.  They dealt with the latter part of Henry’s reign, when he had rid himself of Wolsey, and was personally ruling England with the aid of Thomas Cromwell.  Froude had to describe the dissolution of the monasteries, and besides describing he justified it.  He had to depict the absolute government of Henry; and he argued that it was a necessity of the times.  We must not transfer the passions of one age to the controversies of another.  In the seventeenth century the issue was between the Stuart kings and their Parliaments, or, in other words, between the Crown and the people.  In the sixteenth century king and Parliament were united against an alien power, the Catholic Church, and a foreign prince, the Pope.  Before England was free she had to become Protestant, and Henry, whatever his motives, was on the Protestant side.  That he was himself an unscrupulous tyrant is beside the point.  He was an ephemeral phaemomenon, and, as a matter of fact, his tyranny, which the people never felt, died with him.  The Church of Rome was a permanent fact, immortal, if not unchangeable, which would have reduced England, if it had prevailed, to the condition of France, Italy, and Spain.  Whether Henry viii. was a good man, or a bad one, is not the question.  Bishop Stubbs, who