Freeman’s reckless and unscholarly attacks upon Froude produced no effect upon his own master Stubbs, whom he was always covering with adulation.  From the Chair of Modern History at Oxford in 1876 Stubbs pronounced Froude’s “great book,” as he called it, to be “a work of great industry, power, and importance.”  Stubbs was as far as possible from agreeing with Froude in opinion.  An orthodox Churchman and a staunch Tory, he never varied in his opposition to Liberalism, as well ecclesiastical as political, and he had no sympathy with the reformers.  But his simple, manly, pious character was incapable of supporting his cause by personal slander.  Unlike Freeman, he had a rich vein of racy humour, which he indulged in a famous epigram on Froude and Kingsley, too familiar for quotation.  But he could appreciate Froude’s learning and industry, for he was a real student himself.

The controversy between Froude and Freeman, however, was by no means at an end, and I may as well proceed at once to the conclusion of it, chronology notwithstanding.  In the year 1877, Froude contributed to The Nineteenth Century a series of papers on the Life and Times of Thomas Becket, since republished in the fourth volume of his Short Studies.  Full of interesting information, the result of minute pains, and excellent in style, they make no pretence to be, as the History was, a work of original research.  They are indeed founded upon the Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, which Canon Robertson had edited for the Master of the Rolls in the previous year.  They were of course read by every one, because they were written by Froude, whereas Robertson’s learned Introduction would only have been read by scholars.  Froude’s conclusions were much the same as the erudite Canon’s.  He did not pretend to know the twelfth century as he knew the sixteenth, and he avowedly made use of another man’s knowledge to point his favourite moral that emancipation from ecclesiastical control was a necessary stage in the development of English freedom.  He may have been unconsciously affected by his familiarity with the quarrel between Wolsey and Henry viii. in describing the quarrel between Becket and Henry ii.  The Church of the middle ages discharged invaluable functions which in later times were more properly undertaken by the State.  Froude sided with Henry, and showed, as he had not much difficulty in showing, that there were a good many spots on the robe of Becket’s saintliness.  The immunity of Churchmen, that is, of clergymen, from the jurisdiction of secular tribunals was not conducive either to morality or to order.