Houses of Parliament and with the courts of law.  The moral blot accounts for a good deal of the indignation which Froude excited in minds far less jaundiced than Freeman’s.  No one hated injustice more than Froude.  But cruelty as such did not inspire him with any horror.  No punishment, however atrocious, seemed to him too great for persons clearly guilty of enormous crimes.  I have already referred to his defence of the horrible Boiling Act which disgraced the reign and the parliament of Henry viii.  The account of Mary Stuart’s old and wizened face as it appeared when her false hair and front had been removed after her execution may be set down as an error of taste.  But what is to be said, on the score of humanity, for an historian who in the nineteenth century calmly and in cold blood defended the use of the rack?  Even here Freeman’s ingenuity of suggestion did not desert him.  After quoting part, and part only, of Froude’s sinister apology, he writes, “To all this the answer is very simple.  Every time that Elizabeth and her counsellors sent a prisoner to the rack they committed a breach of the law of England."+ Any one who read this article without reading the History would infer that Froude had maintained the legality, as well as the expediency, of torture.  That is not true.  What Froude says is, “A practice which by the law was always forbidden could be palliated only by a danger so great that the nation had become like an army in the field.  It was repudiated on the return of calmer times, and the employment of it rests a stain on the memory of those by whom it was used.  It is none the less certain, however, that the danger was real and terrible, and the same causes which relieve a commander in active service from the restraints of the common law apply to the conduct of statesmen who are dealing with organised treason.  The law is made for the nation, not the nation for the law.  Those who transgress it do it at their own risk, but they may plead circumstances at the bar of history, and have a right to be heard.”  Thus Froude asserts as strongly and clearly as Freeman himself that torture was in 1580, and always had been, contrary to the law of England.  On the purely legal and technical aspect of the question a point might be raised which neither Froude nor Freeman has attempted to solve.  Would any Court in the reign of Elizabeth have convicted a man of a criminal offence for carrying out the express commands of the sovereign?  If not, in what sense was the racking of the Jesuits illegal?  But there is a law of God, as well as a law of man, and surely Elizabeth broke it.  Froude’s argument seems to prove too much, if it proves anything, for it would justify all the worst cruelties ever inflicted by tyrants for political objects, from the burning of Christians who refused incense for the Roman Emperor to Luke’s iron crown, and Damien’s bed of steel.

—­ * Saturday Review, Jan. 29th, 1870. + Saturday Review, Dec. 1st, 1867. —­