That Froude set out with a polemical purpose is not to be denied.  He had seen enough of the Romanist or Anglican revival to dislike it heartily, and he held that Protestant countries were the most prosperous because they were morally the best.  Although he did not accept the Evangelical theology, he thought Calvinism the most philosophic form of religious belief, and Puritanism the soundest sort of ethical creed.  The Church of England as understood by his father was to him the healthiest of ecclesiastical institutions, teaching godliness, inculcating duty, saying as little as possible about dogma.  Religion, he said, was meant to be obeyed, not to be examined.  The sun was invaluable, unless you looked at it If you looked at it, you saw neither it nor anything else.  But for the Reformation, England, like France, might be under a worthless despot sanctified by the Church, or, like Spain, be trampled under the feet of priests.  The statutes of Henry viii. were the title-deeds of the English Church.  Henry established the supremacy of the State by letters patent, praemunire, and conge d’elire.  The old bluebeard Henry, who spent his whole time in murdering his wives, was a nursery toy.  The real Henry put two wives to death by lawful means on definite and substantial charges of which death was the penalty.  His subjects were quite as anxious as he could be that he should have a male heir, and few now suppose that Anne Boleyn, or Katharine Howard, was faithful to her husband.  The Church of Rome would have dethroned Henry and incited his subjects to rebellion.  It was war to the knife, and the King won.

Froude regarded Henry’s victory as the salvation of England.  The dissolution of the monasteries was an incident in the struggle, necessary for the public interest, and justified by the evidence.  Although part of their confiscated property was bestowed upon statesmen and courtiers, part went to found new Cathedral colleges, or grammar schools, and part to strengthen the national defences.  Henry was a strange mixture, quite as much patriot as tyrant, and not safe enough on his throne to tolerate Popery.  In Froude’s view he stood for the nation.  More and Fisher were for a foreign power.  The time with which Froude chose to deal was full of blazing fire, which the ashes of three hundred years imperfectly covered.  He did not realise the ordeal to which he was exposing himself, the malice he was stirring up.  His whole life had been a preparation for the task.  When he had the free run of his father’s library after leaving Westminster, it was to the historical shelves that he went first; and while his brother talked eloquently about the evils of the Reformation, he himself was studying its causes.  His own entanglement in the Anglican revival was personal, accidental, and brief.  It was due entirely to his affectionate admiration for Newman, aided perhaps, if by anything, by curiosity to know something about the lives of the saints.  For a real saint, such as Hugh of Lincoln, he had a sincere reverence, and loved to show it.  The miraculous element disgusted him, and the more he read of ecclesiastical performances the more anti-ecclesiastical he became.