—­ * Spanish Story of the Armada, pp. 27, 28. —­

“God and one,” it has been said, “make a majority.”  But in this case God was not on the side of the pious and incompetent Medina Sidonia.

It was not till this same year 1892, after Freeman’s death, that the “Calendar of Letters and State Papers relative to English affairs preserved principally in the Archives of Simancas” began to be published in England by the Master of the Rolls.  Translated by an eminent scholar, Mr. Martin Hume, and printed in a book, they could have been read by Freeman himself, and can be read by any one who cares to undertake the task.  They will at least give some idea of the enormous labour undergone by Froude in his several sojourns at Simancas.  I cannot profess to have instituted a systematic comparison, but a few specimens selected at random show that Froude summarised fairly the documents with which he dealt.  That there should be some discrepancies was inevitable.

Philip ii. wrote a remarkably bad hand, and his Ambassadors were not chosen for their penmanship.  The most striking fact in the case is that Mr. Hume has derived assistance from Froude in the performance of his own duties.  “I have,” he writes in his Introduction, “very carefully compared the Spanish text when doubtful with Mr. Froude’s extracts and copies and with transcripts of many of the letters in the British Museum.”  Nothing could give a better idea than this sentence of the difficulties which Froude had to surmount, or of the fidelity with which he surmounted them.  He had not only achieved his own object:  he also smoothed the path of future labourers in the same field.  It was the inaccessibility of the records at Simancas that enabled Freeman to accuse Froude of not correctly transcribing or abstracting manuscripts.  Like other people, he made mistakes; but mistakes have to be weighed as well as counted, and even in enumerating Froude’s we must always remember that he used more original matter than any other modern historian.

CHAPTER VI

IRELAND AND AMERICA

Froude had made history the business of his life, and he had no sooner completed his History of England than he turned his attention to the sister people.  The Irish chapters in his great book had been picked out by hostile critics as especially good, and in them he had strongly condemned the cruel misgovernment of an Englishman otherwise so humane as Essex.  While he was in Ireland he had examined large stores of material in Dublin, which he compared with documents at the Record Office in London, and he contemplated early in 1871, if not before, a book on Irish history.  For this task he was not altogether well qualified.  The religion of Celtic Ireland was repugnant to him, and he never thoroughly understood it.  In religious matters Froude could not be neutral.  Where Catholic and Protestant came into conflict, he took instinctively,