Historically, if not doctrinally, Freeman was a High Churchman, and his ecclesiastical leanings were a great advantage to him in dealing with the eleventh century.  It was far otherwise when he came to write of the sixteenth.  If the Church of the sixteenth century had been like the Church of the eleventh century, or the twelfth, or the thirteenth, there would have been no Reformation, and no Froude.  Freeman lived, and loved, the controversial life.  Sharing Gladstone’s politics both in Church and State, he was in all secular matters a strong Liberal, and his hatred of Disraeli struck even Liberals as bordering on fanaticism.  Yet his hatred of Disraeli was as nothing to his hatred of Froude.  By nature “so over-violent or over-civil that every man with him was God or devil,” he had erected Froude into his demon incarnate.  Other men might be, Froude must be, wrong.  He detested Froude’s opinions.  He could not away with his style.  Freeman’s own style was forcible, vigorous, rhetorical, hard; the sort of style which Macaulay might have written if he had been a pedant and a professor instead of a politician and a man of the world.  It was not ill suited for the blood-and-thunder sort of reviewing to which his nature disposed him, and for the vengeance of the High Churchmen he seemed an excellent tool.

Freeman’s biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude.  I think the Dean’s conduct was judicious.  But there is no reason why a biographer of Froude should follow his example.  On the contrary, it is absolutely essential that he should not; for Freeman’s assiduous efforts, first in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary, Review, did ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the truth.  But, before I come to details, let me say one word more about Freeman’s qualifications for the task which he so lightly and eagerly undertook.  Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not incapable of candour.  He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly to his friends.  To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of April, 1857 [1867?], “You have found me out about the sixteenth century.  I fancy that, from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get credit for knowing more of those times than I do.  But one can belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are quite right when you say that I have ’never thrown the whole force of my mind on that portion of history.’"* These words pour a flood of light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade.  His object was to belabour Froude.  His own acquaintance with the subject was, as he says, “very small,” but sufficient for enabling him to dispose satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in thorough and exhaustive research.  On another occasion, also writing to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, “I find I have a reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of which I am profoundly ignorant."+