Camden and seen ‘Ark Regis’ staring us full in the face.”  Freeman did not know the meaning of historical research as conducted by a real scholar like Froude.  Froude had not gone to Camden, who in Freeman’s eyes represented the utmost stretch of Elizabethan learning.  If Freeman had had more natural shrewdness, it might have occurred to him that the name of a great seaman was not an unlikely name for a ship.  But he could never fall lightly, and heavily indeed did he fall on this occasion.  With almost incredible fatuity, he wrote, “The puzzle of guessing how Mr. Froude got at so grotesque a union of words as ‘Ark Raleigh’ fades before the greater puzzle of guessing what idea he attached to the words ‘Ark Raleigh’ when he had got them together.”  When Freeman was most hopelessly wrong he always began to parody Macaulay.  Corruptio optimi pessima.  “Ark Raleigh” means Raleigh’s ship, and Froude took the name, “Ark Rawlie” as it was then spelt, from the manuscripts at the Rolls House.  He was of course right, and Freeman was wrong.  But that is not all.  Freeman could easily have put himself right if he had chosen to take the trouble.  Edwards’s Life of Raleigh appeared in 1868, and a copy of it is in Freeman’s library at Owens College.  Edwards gives an account of the Ark Raleigh, which was built for Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Raleigh advancing two hundred pounds.  Freeman, however, need not have read this book to find out the truth.  For “the Ark Raleigh” occurs fourteen times in a Calendar of Manuscripts from 1581 to 1590, published by Robert Lemon in 1865.  When Freeman was brought to book, and taxed with this gross blunder, he pleaded that he “did a true verdict give according to such evidence as came before him.”  The implied analogy is misleading.  Jurymen are bound by their oaths, and by their duty, to find a verdict one way or the other.  Freeman was under no obligation to say anything about the Ark Raleigh.  Prudence and ignorance might well have restrained his pen.

Two blots in Froude’s History Freeman may, I think, be acknowledged to have hit.  One was intellectual; the other was moral.  It was pure childishness to suggest that Froude had never heard of the peine forte et dure, and only invincible prejudice could have dictated such a sentence as “That Mr. Froude’s law would be queer might be taken as a matter of course."* Still, it is true, and a serious misfortune, that Froude took very little interest in legal and constitutional questions.  For, while they had not the same importance in the sixteenth century as they had in the seventeenth, they cannot be disregarded to the extent in which Froude disregarded them without detracting from the value of his book as a whole.  He did not sit down, like Hallam, to write a constitutional history, and he could not be expected to deal with his subject from that special point of view.  Freeman’s complaint, which is quite just, was that he neglected almost entirely the relations of the Crown with the