Froude’s essays might have been forgotten, like other brilliant articles in other magazines, if Freeman had let them alone.  But the spectacle of Froude presuming to write upon those earlier periods of which The Saturday Review had so often and so dogmatically pronounced him to be ignorant, drove Freeman into print.  If he had disagreed with Froude on the main question, the only question which matters now, he would have been justified, and more than justified, in setting out the opposite view.  A defence of Becket against Henry, of the Church against the State, from the pen of a competent writer, would have been as interesting and as important a contribution as Froude’s own papers to the great issue between Sacerdotalism and Erastianism.  There is a great deal more to be said for Becket than for Wolsey; and though Freeman found it difficult to state any case with temperance, he could have stated this case with power.  But, much as he disliked Froude, he agreed with him.  “Looking,” he wrote, “at the dispute between Henry and Thomas by the light of earlier and of later ages, we see that the cause of Henry was the right one; that is, we see that it was well that the cause of Henry triumphed in the long run.”  Nevertheless he rushed headlong upon his victim, and “belaboured” Froude, with all the violence of which he was capable, in The Contemporary Review.  Hitherto his attacks had been anonymous.  Now for the first time he came into the open, and delivered his assault in his own name.  Froude’s forbearance, as well as his own vanity, had blinded him to the danger he was incurring.  The first sentence of his first article explains the fury of an invective for which few parallels could be found since the days of the Renaissance.  “Mr. Froude’s appearance on the field of mediaeval history will hardly be matter of rejoicing to those who have made mediaeval history one of the chief studies of their lives.”  Freeman’s pedantry was, as Matthew Arnold said, ferocious, and he seems to have cherished the fantastic delusion that particular periods of history belonged to particular historians.  Before writing about Becket Froude should, according to this primitive doctrine, have asked leave of Freeman, or of Stubbs, or of an industrious clergyman, Professor Brewer, who edited with ability and learning several volumes of the Rolls Series.  That to warn off Froude would be to warn off the public was so much the better for the purposes of an exclusive clique.  For Froude’s style, that accursed style which was gall and wormwood to Freeman, “had,” as he kindly admitted, “its merits.”  Page after page teems with mere abuse, a sort of pale reflection, or, to vary the metaphor, a faint echo from Cicero on Catiline, or Burke on Hastings.  “On purely moral points there is no need now for me to enlarge; every man who knows right from wrong ought to be able to see through the web of ingenious sophistry which tries to justify the slaughter of More and Fisher”; although the guilt of More and Fisher is a question not of morality, but of evidence.  “Mr. Froude by his own statement has not made history the study of his life,” which was exactly what he had done, and stated that he had done.  “The man who insisted on the Statute-book being the text of English history showed that he had never heard of peine forte et dure, and had no clear notion of a Bill of Attainder.”