Bloomsbury Publishing - J.A. Froudes Mary Tudor

J. A. Froude (18281894)

The Reign of Mary Tudor

(1860)

Eamon Duffy is Professor of The History of Christianity at The University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Magdalene College. His most recent book was Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (Yale University Press, 2009). Two previous titles, Faith of Our Fathers (2004) and Walking to Emmaus (2006), were both published by Continuum.

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J. A. FROUDE

The Reign
of Mary Tudor

Introduced and selected by
Eamon Duffy

G reat historical writing, perhaps all historical writing, holds a mirror up to two different worlds: the age it sets out to describe, and the age in which it is written. The historian aims to understand and explain the past. But the questions historians bring to the past often reflect the anxieties and preoccupations of the present. Of no great historical work is this more true than James Anthony Froudes monumental 12-volume study of The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada , published between 1858 and 1870.

Froudes intellectual career was stormy even by the contentious standards of Victorian England. Born in 1818, he was the fourth son of a stern West Country parson. His father was an old-fashioned, high and dry churchman, archdeacon of Totnes from 1820 till his death in 1859. His mother died two years after James Anthonys birth. The future historian was raised in a male-dominated household of rigid discipline and little overt affection, disapproved of at home and bullied at school. He was overshadowed by his brilliant, ebullient and egotistical eldest brother Hurrell, whose idea of toughening his timid and sickly sibling was to lower him head-first into a Devon stream and stir the mud with his hair. Before his premature death from tuberculosis in 1836, Hurrell was to become one of the founding fathers of the Tractarian Movement, the Oxford-based, clerical ginger group which sought to recover and promote the Catholic aspects of the Anglican tradition. The publication of Hurrell Froudes inflammatory and opinionated literary Remains by his friend and admirer John Henry Newman in 1838 was both a turning point in the history of the movement, and a staging post on Newmans own journey into the Roman Catholic Church.

James Anthony arrived in Oxford just months before his brothers death, and fell at once under the spell of Newmans magnetic personality. His first historical work was a life of the Saxon St Neot, which he contributed to a hagiographical series on the English saints edited by the older man. Froude was never to lose his personal reverence for Newman, one of the ablest of living men For him, the triumph of the Reformation did not lie in the replacement of a Catholic creed by a Protestant one, for Froude himself had reservations about all creeds whatever. What Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth had achieved, instead, was the shattering of clerical power, and the liberation of the lay conscience from ecclesiastical control and nonsensical mumbo-jumbo. In the Tractarian nostalgia for the Catholic past and, even more, in the contemporary revival in England of the Roman Catholic Church, Froude saw a mindless retreat on superstition and intellectual oppression.

Victorian England was militantly Protestant. Yet disparagement of the Reformation was common among early Victorian writers. The great Whig historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay, valued the sixteenth-century break with the Papacy as a step away from obscurantism on the road to modernity. But he saw the Reformation itself as an ignoble episode, initiated by tyranny and driven by the basest of motives:

Elsewhere, worldliness was the tool of zeal. Here, zeal was the tool of worldliness. A King, whose character may best be described by saying that he was despotism itself personified, unprincipled ministers, a rapacious aristocracy, a servile Parliament, such were the instruments by which England was delivered from the yoke of Rome.

For quite different reasons, the Tractarians also distanced themselves from the first Reformers, because they had repudiated the Catholic inheritance which the Oxford Movement now sought to reinstate. In one of the most notorious sentences in Hurrell Froudes Remains , James Anthonys brother declared the English Reformation to be a limb badly set it must be broken again to be righted. Newman too had cast a bleak eye on the founding fathers of Anglicanism: Cranmer will not stand examination, he had written in 1838, the English Church will yet be ashamed of conduct like his.

These jaundiced views of the Reformation and its leaders had been given formidable scholarly underpinning by the work of a learned Catholic historian, the priest John Lingard. His soberly understated ten-volume History of England , completed in 1830, had marshalled new material from hitherto unexploited European archives into a deeply unflattering picture of the origin and progress of Henry VIIIs break with Rome. Despite his suspect status as a Catholic priest, Lingards scholarship was widely respected and, though he seldom mentioned him by name, Froude often had this influential Catholic historian firmly in his sights.

Froudes great History was therefore deliberately conceived as a defence of the English Reformation. It was, however, financial necessity that drove Froude to the writing of that history. In 1849 he published a lurid semi-autobiographical novel, The Nemesis of Faith , whose clerical hero is plagued by religious doubts, flirts with adultery and suicide, becomes a Roman Catholic and enters a monastery, but ultimately dies in despair. The scandal which erupted around this sensational novel changed the course of Froudes life. His horrified father disowned him, and he was forced to resign his Fellowship at Exeter College Oxford. To hold his Fellowship in the first place, he had been obliged to accept ordination as a deacon in the Church of England, despite his religious doubts. This unwanted clerical status now legally prevented Froude earning a living in any of the other professions. Married, and with a growing family, he settled in idyllic, if impoverished, seclusion at Plas Gwynant, near Snowdon in North Wales, in 1850. He commenced work as a jobbing journalist, writing reviews and essays for many periodicals. Froude also conceived the idea of a biography of Elizabeth I and began reading the available printed sources. As he became more absorbed, the scope of the project widened to take in the whole of the English Reformation, understood as a revolt against idolatry and superstitionof the laity against the clergy, and of the English nation against the papal supremacy.