The analogy of a commander in active service is inadequate.  Elizabeth, Burghley, Walsingham, were not commanders on active service; and if they had been, they would have had no right, on any Christian or civilised principle, to torture prisoners.  Unless the end justifies the means, in which case there is no morality, the rack was an abomination, and those who applied it to extort either confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy Inquisitors.  Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for the rack.  In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with him in 1586.  “They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony was still unimpaired, and cut in pieces afterwards with due precautions for the protraction of the pain.  If it was to be taken as part of the Catholic creed that to kill a prince in the interests of Holy Church was an act of piety and merit, stern English common sense caught the readiest means of expressing its opinion on the character both of the creed and its professors.”

Stern English common sense!  To suggest that the English people had anything to do with it is a libel on the English nation.  Elizabeth had the decency to forbid the repetition of such atrocities.  That she should have tolerated them at all is a stain upon her character, as his sophistical plea for them is a stain upon Froude’s.

On the 12th of January, 1870, Freeman delivered in The Saturday Review his final verdict on Froude’s History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.  It is one of the most preposterous judgments that ever found their way into print.  In knowledge of the subject, and in patient assiduity of research, Froude was immeasurably Freeman’s superior, and his life had been devoted to historic studies.  Yet this was the language in which the editor of the first literary journal in England permitted Freeman to write of the greatest historical work completed since Macaulay died:  “He has won his place among the popular writers of the day; his name has come to be used as a figure of speech, sometimes in strange company with his betters ....  But an historian he is not; four volumes of ingenious paradox, eight volumes of ecclesiastical pamphlet, do not become a history, either because of the mere number of volumes, or because they contain a narrative which gradually shrinks into little more than a narrative of diplomatic intrigues.  The main objections to Mr. Froude’s book, the blemishes which cut it off from any title to the name of history, are utter carelessness as to facts and utter incapacity to distinguish right from wrong ....  That burning zeal for truth, for truth in all matters great and small, that zeal which shrinks from no expenditure of time and toil in the pursuit of truth—­the spirit without which history, to be worthy of the