will believe anything, even that she did not reward the murderer of her brother, or that she would have spared Elizabeth if Elizabeth had been in her power.  And at least Froude does not, like some more modern writers, degrade her to the level of a kitchen wench.  Froude’s Elizabeth was the subject of bitter, hostile, sometimes violent, criticism in The Saturday Review, the property of an ardent High Churchman, Beresford Hope.  In the next chapter I shall deal with these articles at more length.  It is enough to say here that they were directed not merely at Froude’s accuracy as an historian, but at his truthfulness as a man, suggesting that the mode in which he had manipulated authorities accessible to every one threw grave doubts upon his version of what he read at Simancas.  Froude knew very well that he should make enemies.  His belief that history had been cericalised, and required to be laicised, was regarded as peculiarly offensive in one who had been himself ordained.

Mary Stuart, moreover, had stalwart champions beyond the border who were neither clerical nor ecclesiastical.  “I fear,” Froude wrote on the 22nd of May, 1862, to his Scottish friend Skelton, who was himself much interested in the subject—­“I fear my book will bring all your people about my ears.  Mary Stuart, from my point of view, was something between Rachel and a pantheress.”

The success of the History had been long since assured, and each successive pair of volumes met with a cordial welcome.  Many people disagreed with Froude on many points.  He expected disagreement, and did not mind it.  But no one could fail to see the evidence of patient, thorough research which every chapter, almost every page, contains.  Indeed, it might be said with justice, or at least with some plausibility, that the long and frequent extracts from the despatches of De Feria, de Quadra, de Silva, and Don Guereau, successively Ambassadors from Philip to Elizabeth, water-log the book, and make it too like a series of extracts with explanatory comments.  Of Froude’s own style there could not be two opinions.  His bitterest antagonists were forced to admit that it was the perfection of easy, graceful narrative, without the majestic splendour of Gibbon, but also without the mechanical hardness of Macaulay.  Froude did not stop deliberately, as other historians have stopped, to paint pictures or draw portraits, and there are few writers from whom it is more difficult to make typical or characteristic extracts.  Yet, as I have already quoted from his account of Cranmer’s execution, it may not be inappropriate that I should cite some of the thoughts suggested to him by the death of Knox.  Morton’s epitaph is well known.