them.  Henry did all he could to put himself in the wrong.  His atrocious request that More “would not use many words on the scaffold” makes one hate him after the lapse of well-nigh four hundred years.  The question, however, is not one of personal feeling.  Good men go wrong.  Bad men are made by providence to be instruments for good.  It is not More, nor Fisher, it is the Bluebeard of the children’s history-books who gave England Miles Coverdale’s Bible, who freed her from the yoke that oppressed France till the Revolution, and oppresses Spain to-day.  Froude’s first four volumes are an eloquent indictment of Ultramontanism, a plea for the Reformation, a sustained argument for English liberties and freedom of thought.  No such book can be impartial in the sense of admitting that there is as much to be said on one side as on the other.  Froude replied to The Edinburgh Review in Fraser’s Magazine for September, 1858, and in the following month the reviewer retorted.  He did not really shake the foundation of Froude’s case, which was the same as Luther’s.  Luther, like Froude, was no democrat.  To both of them the Reformation was a protest against ecclesiastical tyranny, or for spiritual freedom.  “The comedy has ended in a marriage,” said Erasmus of Luther and Luther’s wife.  It was not a comedy, and it had not ended.

Froude sometimes goes too far.  When he defends the Boiling Act, under which human beings were actually boiled alive in Smithfield, he shakes confidence in his judgment.  He sets too much value upon the verdicts of Henry’s tribunals, forgetting Macaulay’s emphatic declaration that State trials before 1688 were murder under the forms of law.  Although the subject of his Prize Essay at Oxford was “The Influence of the Science of Political Economy upon the Moral and Social Welfare of a Nation,” he never to the end of his life understood what political economy was.  Misled by Carlyle, he conceived it to be a sort of “Gospel,” a rival system to the Christian religion, instead of useful generalisations from the observed course of trade.  He never got rid of the idea that Governments could fix the rate of wages and the price of goods.  A more serious fault found by The Edinburgh reviewer, the ablest of all Froude’s critics, was the implication rather than the assertion that Henry viii.’s Parliaments represented the people.  The House of Commons in the sixteenth century was really chosen through the Sheriffs by the Crown, and the preambles of the Statutes, upon which Froude relied as evidence of contemporary opinion, showed the opinion of the Government rather than the opinion of the people.