The article in The Edinburgh Review for July, 1858, upon Froude’s first four volumes is an elaborate, an able, and a bitter attack.  Henry Reeve, the editor of The Edinburgh at that time, and for many years afterwards, was not himself a scholar, like his illustrious predecessor, Cornewall Lewis.  He was a Whig of the most conventional type, regarding Macaulay and Hallam as the ideal historians, suspicious of novelty, and dismayed by paradox.  Froude’s critic belonged to a more advanced school of Liberalism, and shuddered at the glorification of a “tyrant” like Henry viii.  That he had also some reason for personally detesting Froude is plain from his malicious references to the Lives of the Saints, and to The Nemesis of Faith, which Froude himself had, so far as he could, suppressed.  When Froude’s name was restored to the books of Exeter College in 1858, he wrote to Dr. Lightfoot, the Rector, that he regretted the publication both of The Nemesis and of Shadows of the Clouds.  His object in future, he added, would be to defend the Church of England.  That his idea of the Church was the same as Lightfoot’s is improbable.  Froude meant the Church of the Reformation, of private judgment, of an open Bible, of lay independence of bishop or priest.  To that Church he was faithful, and he sympathised in sentiment, if he did not agree in dogma, with evangelical Christians.  With Catholics, Roman or Anglican, he neither had nor pretended to have any sympathy at all.  The Reformation is a convenient name for a complex European movement, difficult to describe, and almost impossible to define; but so far as it was English and constitutional, it is embodied in the legislation of Henry viii., which substituted the supremacy of the Crown for the supremacy of the Pope.  It was because Froude wrote avowedly in defence of that change that he incurred the bitter hostility of a powerful section in the English Church.  He also irritated, partly perhaps because his tone betrayed the influence of Carlyle, a large body of Liberal opinion to which all despotism and persecution were obnoxious.  The compliments, the reluctant compliments, of The Edinburgh reviewer must be taken as the admissions of an enemy.  He acknowledges fully and frankly the thoroughness of Froude’s research among the State Papers of the reign, not merely those printed and published by Robert Lemon, but “a large manuscript collection of copies of letters, minutes of council, theological tracts, parliamentary petitions, depositions upon trials, and miscellaneous communications upon the state of the country furnished by agents of the Government, all relating to the early years of the English Reformation.”  No historian has ever been more diligent than Froude was in reading and collating manuscripts.  For Henry’s reign alone he read and transcribed six hundred and eighty-seven pages in his small, close handwriting.  That in so doing, and in working without assistance, he should sometimes fall into error was unavoidable.  But he never spared himself.  He was the most laborious of students, and his History was as difficult to write as it is easy to read.  He had, as this hostile reviewer says, a “genuine love of historical research,” and there is point in the same critic’s complaint that his pages are “over-loaded with long quotations from State Papers.”