Part 6 (1/2)

- Several years afterwards, in 1878, the subject was fully discussed, and Froude's conclusions were shown to be unsound, by another historian, William Edward Hartpole Lecky. Lecky was a much more formidable critic than Freeman. Calm in temperament and moderate in language, he could take part in an historical controversy without getting into a rage. Freeman, after pages of mere abuse, would pounce with triumphant e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns upon a misprint. Lecky did not waste his time either on scolding or on trifles. The faults he found were grave, and his censure was not the less severe for being decorous. An Anglicised Irishman, living in England, though a graduate of Dublin University, Lecky became known when he was a very young man for a brilliant little book on Leaders of Irish Opinion. He had since published mature and valuable histories of rationalism, and of morals. His History of England in the Eighteenth Century is likely to remain a standard book, being written with fairness, lucidity, and candour. It is true that in his Irish chapters, with which alone I am concerned, Lecky, like Froude, wrote with a purpose. He was an Irish patriot, and bent on making out the best possible case for his own country.

At the same time he was, for an Irishman, singularly impartial between Catholic and Protestant, leaning, if at all, to the Protestant side. Yet he repudiated with indignant vehemence Froude's attempt to connect the Catholic Church with these atrocious crimes. I am bound to say that I think he disproves the charge of ecclesiastical complicity. The evidence upon which Froude relied, the only evidence accessible, is the collection of presentments by Grand Juries, with the accompanying depositions, in Dublin Castle. In the first sixty years of the eighteenth century there were twenty-eight cases of abduction thus recorded. In only four of them can it be shown that the perpetrator was a Catholic and the victim a Protestant. In only one, which Froude has described at much length, did the criminal try to make a Protestant girl attend ma.s.s. For one of the cases, which according to Froude went unpunished, two men were hanged. ”The truth is,” says Lecky, ”that the crime was merely the natural product of a state of great lawlessness and barbarism.”* These offences have so completely disappeared from Ireland that even the memory of them has perished, and yet Ireland remains as Catholic as ever. Arthur Young, who denounces them as scandalous to a civilised community, does not hint that they had anything to do with religion, nor were they ever cited in defence of the penal code. Froude was led astray by religious prejudice, and forgot for once the historian in the advocate. The penal codes were rather the cause than the effect of crime and outrage in Ireland. By setting authority on one side, and popular religion on the other, they made a breach of the law a pious and meritorious act. The bane of English rule in Ireland at that time was the treatment of Catholics as enemies, and the, Charter Schools which Froude praises were employed for the purpose of alienating children from the faith of their parents. This mean and paltry persecution strengthened instead of weakening the Roman Catholic Church.

- * England in the Eighteenth Century, ii. 365. -

Meanwhile Froude continued his History, and by the beginning of the year 1874 had brought it down to the Union, with which it concludes. No more unsparing indictment of a nation has ever been drawn. Except Lord Clare, and the Orange Lodges, formed after the Battle of the Diamond, scarcely an Irishman or an Irish inst.i.tution spared. Grattan's Parliament, though it did contain a single Catholic, is condemned because it gave the Catholics votes in 1793. The recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, an Englishman and a Protestant, in 1795, is justified because he was in favour of emanc.i.p.ation. Flood and Curran are treated with disdain. Burke, though he was no more a Catholic than Froude himself, is told that he was not a true Protestant, and did not understand his own countrymen. Sir Ralph Abercrombie was possessed with an ”evil spirit,” because he urged that rebels should not be punished by soldiers without the sanction of the civil magistrate. His successor, General Lake, who was responsible for pitch-caps, receives a gentle, a very gentle, reprimand.

”The United Irishmen had affected the fas.h.i.+on of short hair. The loyalists called them Croppies, and if a Croppy prisoner stood silent when it was certain [without a trial] that he could confess with effect, paper or linen caps smeared with pitch were forced upon his head to bring him to his senses. Such things ought not to have been, and such things would not have been had General Lake been supplied with English troops, but a.s.sa.s.sins and their accomplices will not always be delicately handled by those whose lives they have threatened occasionally. Not a few men suffered who were innocent, so far as no definite guilt could be proved against them. At such times, however, those who are not actively loyal lie in the borderland of just suspicion.”* That all Irish Catholics were guilty unless they could prove themselves to be innocent is a proposition which cannot be openly maintained, and vitiates history if it be tacitly a.s.sumed. Froude honestly and sincerely believed that the Irish people were unfit for representative government. He compares the Irish rebellion of 1798 with the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and suggests that Ireland should have been treated like Oude. Lord Moira, known afterwards as Lord Hastings, and Governor-General of India, is called a traitor because he sympathised with the aspirations of his countrymen. Lord Cornwallis is severely censured for endeavouring to infuse a spirit of moderation into the Executive after the rebellion had been put down. What Cornwallis thought of the means by which the Union was carried is well known. ”I long,” he said in 1799 ”to kick those whom my public duty obliges me to court. My occupation is to negociate and job with the most corrupt people under heaven. I despise and hate myself every hour for engaging in such dirty work, and am supported only by the reflection that without a Union the British Empire must be dissolved.” That is the real case for the Union, which could not be better stated than Cornwallis has stated it. Carried by corrupt means as it was, it might have met with gradual acquiescence if only it had been accompanied, as Pitt meant to accompany it, by Catholic emanc.i.p.ation. On this point Froude goes all lengths with George III., whose hatred of Catholicism was not greater than his own. In the development of his theory, he was courageous and consistent. He struck at great names, denouncing ”the persevering disloyalty of the Liberal party, in both Houses of the English Legislature,” including Fox, Sheridan, Tierney, Holland, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk, who dared to propose a policy of conciliation with Ireland, as Burke had proposed it with the American colonies. Even Pitt does not come up to Froude's standard, for Pitt removed Lord Camden, and sent out Lord Cornwallis.

- * English in Ireland, iii. 336. -

It is no disqualification for an historian to hold definite views, which, if he holds them, it must surely be his duty to express. The fault of The English in Ireland is to overstate the case, to make it appear that there was no ground for rebellion in 1798, and no objection to union in 1800. The whole book is written on the supposition that the Irish are an inferior race and Catholicism an inferior religion. So far as religion was concerned, Lecky did not disagree with Froude. But either because he was an Irishman, or because he had a judicial mind, he could see the necessity of understanding what Irish Catholics aimed at before pa.s.sing judgment upon them. Froude could never get out of his mind the approval of treason and a.s.sa.s.sination to which in the sixteenth century the Vatican was committed. It may be fascinating polemics to taunt the Church of Rome with being ”always the same.” But as a matter of fact the Church is not the same. It improves with the general march of the progress that it condemns. Froude fairly and honourably quotes a crucial instance. Pitt ”sought the opinion of the Universities of France and Spain on the charge generally alleged against Catholics that their allegiance to their sovereign was subordinate to their allegiance to the Pope; that they held that heretics might lawfully be put to death, and that no faith was to be kept with them. The Universities had unanimously disavowed doctrines which they declared at once inhuman and unchristian, and on the strength of the disavowal the British Parliament repealed the Penal Acts of William for England and Scotland, restored to the Catholics the free use of their chapels, and readmitted them to the magistracy.” Toleration was extended to Ireland by giving the franchise to Catholics, and complete emanc.i.p.ation might have followed but for the interference of the king, which involved the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam.

To prevent that calamitous measure no one worked harder than Edmund Burke, whose religion was as rational as his patriotism was sincere. In the last of his published letters, written to Sir Hercules Langrishe, in the year before the rebellion, the year of his own death, he said that ”Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a word, with her to live and to die.” ”At bottom,” he added, ”Ireland has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice.” To a Parliamentary Union accompanied by emanc.i.p.ation Burke might have been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood in his time he would always have repudiated, if only because it furnished recruits to the Jacobinism which he loathed more than anything else in the world. He even denied that there was such a thing as the Protestant religion. The difference between Protestantism and Catholicism was, he said, a negative, and out of a negative no religion could be made. To persecute people for believing too much was even more preposterous than to persecute them for believing too little. Protestant ascendency was social ascendency, and had no motive so respectable as bigotry behind it. Burke never conceived the possibility of disestablis.h.i.+ng the Irish Church, or even of curtailing its emoluments. He would have been satisfied with a Parliament from which Catholics were not excluded. Froude brushed almost contemptuously aside the theories of an ill.u.s.trious Irishman, the first political writer of his age, and an almost fanatical enemy of revolution.

Genius apart, Burke was peculiarly well qualified to form an opinion. He knew England as well as Ireland; and imperial as his conceptions were, they never extinguished his love for the land of his birth. He was himself a member of the Established Church, and a firm supporter of her connection with the State. But his wife was a Roman Catholic, and for the old faith he had a sympathetic respect. For the French Directory, with which Wolfe Tone was a.s.sociated, he felt a pa.s.sionate hatred of which he has left a monument more durable than bra.s.s in the Reflections on the French Revolution, and the Letters on a Regicide Peace. He wors.h.i.+pped the British Const.i.tution with the unquestioning fervour of a devotee, and he had been attacked by the new Whigs in Parliament as the recipient of a pension from the king. The old Whigs, his Whigs, had coalesced with Pitt, and the chief fault he found with the Government was that it did not carry on the French war with sufficient vigour. That Burke should have retained his calmness of mind in writing of Ireland when he lost it in writing of all other subjects is a curious circ.u.mstance, But it is a circ.u.mstance which ent.i.tles him to peculiar attention from the Irish historian. Burke was no oracle of Irish revolutionists. Their hero was his critic, Tom Paine. Yet Froude says that when Burke ”took up the Irish cause at last in earnest, it was with a brain which the French Revolution had deranged, and his interference became infinitely mischievous.”* As a matter of fact, his interference after 1789 had no result at all. So far as the French Revolution modified his ideas, it made them more Conservative than ever, and his object in preaching the conciliation of Catholics was to deter them from Revolutionary methods.

- * English in Ireland, ii. 214, 215. -

But Burke, like Grattan, was an Irishman, and therefore not to be trusted. If he had been an Englishman, or if he had gloried in the name of Protestant, Froude's eyes would have been opened, and he would have seen Burke's incomparable superiority to Lord Clare as a just interpreter of events. Froude looked at the rebellion and the Union from an Orange Lodge, and his book is really an Orange manifesto. Such works have their purpose, and Froude's is an unusually eloquent specimen of its cla.s.s; but they are not history, any more than the speech of Lord Clare on the Union, or the Diary of Wolfe Tone. Froude does not explain, nor seem to understand, what the supporters of the Irish Legislature meant. Speaker Foster said that the whole unbribed intellect of Ireland was against the Union. Foster was the last Speaker in the Irish House of Commons. He had been elected in 1790 against the ”patriot” Ponsonby, and was opposed to the Catholic franchise in 1793. He was a man of unblemished character, and in a position where he could not afford to talk nonsense. Yet, if Froude were right, nonsense he must have talked. Cornwallis, an Englishman, corroborates Foster; Cornwallis is disregarded. ”All that was best and n.o.blest in Ireland” was gathered into the Orange a.s.sociation, which has been the plague of every Irish Government since the Union. Froude's model sovereign of Ireland, as of England, was George III., who ordered that in a Catholic country ”a sharp eye should be kept on Papists,” and would doubtless have joined an Orange Lodge himself if he had been an Irishman and a subject. The English in Ireland is reported to have been Parnell's favourite book. It made him, he said, a Home Ruler because it exposed the iniquities of the English Government. This was not Froude's princ.i.p.al object, but the testimony to his truthfulness is all the more striking on that account. Gladstone, who quoted from the English in Ireland when he introduced his Land Purchase Bill in 1886, paid a just tribute to the ”truth and honour” of the writer.

If it be once granted that the Irish are a subject race, that the Catholic faith is a degrading superst.i.tion, and that Ireland is only saved from ruin by her English or Scottish settlers, Froude's book deserves little but praise. Although he did not study for it as he studied for his History of England he read and copied a large number of State Papers, with a great ma.s.s of official correspondence. Freeman would have been appalled at the idea of such research as Froude made in Dublin, and at the Record Office in London. But the scope of his book, and the thesis he was to develop, had formed themselves in his mind before he began. He was to vindicate the Protestant cause in Ireland, and to his own satisfaction he vindicated it. If I may apply a phrase coined many years afterwards, Froude a.s.sumed that Irish Catholics had taken a double dose of original sin. He always found in them enough vice to account for any persecution of which they might be the victims. Just as he could not write of Kerry without imputing failure and instability to O'Connell, so he could not write about Ireland without traducing the leaders of Irish opinion. They might be Protestants themselves; but they had Catholics for their followers, and that was enough. It was enough for Carlyle also, and to attack Froude's historical reputation is to attack Carlyle's. ”I have read,” Carlyle wrote on the 20th of June, 1874, ”all your book carefully over again, and continue to think of it not less but rather more favourably than ever: a few little phrases and touches you might perhaps alter with advantage; and the want of a copious, carefully weighed concluding chapter is more sensible to me than ever; but the substance of the book is genuine truth, and the utterance of it is clear, sharp, smiting, and decisive, like a s.h.i.+ning Damascus sabre; I never doubted or doubt but its effect will be great and lasting. No criticism have I seen since you went away that was worth notice. Poor Lecky is weak as water-bilge-water with a drop of formic acid in it: unfortunate Lecky, he is wedded to his Irish idols; let him alone.” The reference to Lecky, as unfair as it is amusing, was provoked by a review of Froude in Macmillan's Magazine. There are worse idols than Burke, or even Grattan, and Lecky was an Irishman after all.

A very different critic from Carlyle expressed an equally favourable opinion.

”I have an interesting letter,” Froude wrote to his friend Lady Derby, formerly Lady Salisbury, ”from Bancroft the historian (American minister at Berlin) on the Irish book. He, I am happy to say, accepts the view which I wished to impress on the Americans, and he has sent me some curious correspondence from the French Foreign Office ill.u.s.trating and confirming one of my points. One evening last summer I met Lady Salisbury,* and told her my opinion of Lord Clare. She dissented with characteristic emphasis-and she is not a lady who can easily be moved from her judgments. Still, if she finds time to read the book I should like to hear that she can recognise the merits as well as the demerits of a statesman who, in the former at least, so nearly resembled her husband.”

- * The wife of the late Prime Minister. -

In another letter he says:

”The meaning of the book as a whole is to show to what comes of forcing uncongenial inst.i.tutions on a country to which they are unsuited. If we had governed Ireland as we govern India, there would have been no confiscation, no persecution of religion, and consequently none of the reasons for disloyalty. Having chosen to set Parliament and an Established Church, and to the lands of the old owners, we left nothing undone to spoil the chances of success with the experiment.”

Froude went to the United States with no very exalted opinion of the Irish; he returned with the lowest possible. ”Like all Irish patriots,” including Grattan, Wolfe Tone ”would have accepted greedily any tolerable appointment from the Government which he had been execrating.” The subsequent history of Ireland has scarcely justified this sweeping invective. ”There are persons who believe that if the king had not interfered with Lord Fitzwilliam, the Irish Catholics would have accepted gratefully the religious equality which he was prepared to offer them, and would have remained thenceforward for all time contented citizens of the British Empire.” So reasonable a theory requires more convincing refutation than a simple statement that it is ”incredible.” Incredible, no doubt, if the Catholics of Ireland were wild beasts, cringing under the whip, ferocious when released from restraint. Very credible indeed if Irish Catholics in 1795 were like other people, asking for justice, and not expecting an impossible ascendency. Interesting as Froude's narrative is, it becomes, when read together with Lecky's, more interesting still. Though indignant with Froude's aspersions upon the Irish race, Lecky did not allow himself to be hurried. He was writing a history of England as well as of Ireland, and the Irish chapters had to wait their turn. In Froude's book there are signs of haste; in Lecky's there are none. Without the brilliancy and the eloquence which distinguished Froude, Lecky had a power of marshalling facts that gave to each of them its proper value. No human being is without prejudice. But Lecky was curiously unlike the typical Irishman of Froude's imagination. He has written what is by general acknowledgment the fairest account of the Irish rebellion, and of the Union to which it led. Of the eight volumes which compose his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, two, the seventh and eighth, are devoted exclusively to Ireland.

After the publication of his first two volumes he made no direct reference to Froude, and contented himself with his own independent narrative. He vindicated the conduct of Lord Fitzwilliam, and traced to his recall in 1795 the desperate courses adopted by Irish Catholics. He showed that Froude had been unjust to the Whigs who gave evidence for Arthur O'Connor at Maidstone in 1798, and especially to Grattan. That O'Connor was engaged in treasonable correspondence with France there can be no doubt now. But he did not tell his secrets to his Whig friends, and what Grattan said of his never having heard O'Connor talk about a French invasion was undoubtedly true.* Froude's hatred of the English Whigs almost equalled his contempt for the Irish Catholics, and the two feelings prevented him from writing anything like an narrative either of the rebellion or of the Union. No other book of his shows such evident traces of having been written under the influence of Carlyle. Carlyle's horror of democracy, wors.h.i.+p of force, his belief that martial law was the law of Almighty G.o.d, and that cruelty might always be perpetrated on the right side, are conspicuously displayed. If Froude spoke of the Roman Catholic Church, he always seemed to fancy himself back in the sixteenth century, when the murder of Protestants was regarded at the Vatican as justifiable. The Irish rebellion of 1798 was led by Protestants, like Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and free thinkers, like Wolfe Tone. But for the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam, the Catholics would have taken no part in it, and it would not have been more dangerous than the rebellion of 1848. Such at least was Lecky's opinion, supported by weighty arguments, and by facts which cannot be denied. If Froude's reputation as an historian depended upon his English in Ireland, it certainly would not stand high. Of course he had as much right to put the English case as Father Burke had to put the Irish one. But his responsibility was far greater, and his splendid talents might have been better employed than in reviving the mutual animosities of religion or of race.

- * See Froude's English in Ireland, vol. iii. pp. 320, 321; Lecky's History of England, vol. viii. p. 52.

- When Lecky reviewed, with much critical asperity, the last two volumes of Froude's English in Ireland for Macmillan's Magazine* he referred to Home Rule as a moderate and const.i.tutional movement. His own History was not completed till 1890. But when Gladstone introduced his first Home Rule Bill, in 1886, Lecky opposed it as strongly as Froude himself. Lecky was quite logical, for the question whether the Union had been wisely or legitimately carried had very little to do with the expedience of repealing it. Fieri non debuit, factum valet, may be common sense as well as good law. But Froude was not unnaturally triumphant to find his old antagonist in Irish matters on his side, especially as Freeman was a Home Ruler. Froude's att.i.tude was never for a moment doubtful. He had always held that the Irish people were quite unfitted for self-government, and of all English statesmen Gladstone was the one he trusted least. He had a theory that great orators were always wrong, even when, like Pitt and Fox, they were on opposite sides. Gladstone he doubly repudiated as a High Churchman and a Democrat. Yet, with more candour than consistency, he always declared that Gladstone was the English statesman who best understood the Irish Land Question, and so he plainly told the Liberal Unionists, speaking as one of themselves. He had praised Henry VIII for confiscating the Irish estates of absentees, and taunted Pitt with his unreasoning horror of an absentee tax. He would have given the Irish people almost everything rather than allow them to do anything for themselves. In 1880 he brought out another edition of his Irish book, with a new chapter on the crisis. The intervening years had made no difference in his estimate of Ireland, or of Irishmen. O'Connell, who had nothing to do with the politics of the eighteenth century, was ”not sincere about repeal,” although he ”forced the Whigs to give him whatever he might please to ask for,”+ and he certainly asked for that.

- * June, 1874.

+ English in Ireland, 1881, vol. iii. p. 568.

- That Catholic emanc.i.p.ation was useless and mischievous, Froude never ceased to declare. He would have dragooned the Irish into Protestantism and made the three Catholic provinces into a Crown colony. The Irish establishment he regretted as a badge of Protestant ascendency. But he was a dangerous ally for Unionists. That the government of Ireland by what he called a Protestant Parliament sitting at Westminister, meaning the Parliament of the United Kingdom, had failed, he not merely admitted, but loudly proclaimed. It had failed ”more signally, and more disgracefully,” than any other system, because Gladstone admitted that Fenian outrages precipitated legislative reforms. The alternative was to rule Ireland, or let her be free, and altogether separate from Great Britain. Neither branch of the supposed alternative was within the range of practical politics. But on one point Froude unconsciously antic.i.p.ated the immediate future. ”The remedy” for the agrarian troubles of Ireland was, he said, ”the establishment of courts to which the tenant might appeal.” The ink of this sentence was scarcely dry when the Irish Land Bill of 1881 appeared with that very provision. Froude was always ready and willing to promote the material benefit of Ireland. Irishmen, except the Protestant population of Ulster, were children to be treated with firmness and kindness, the truest kindness being never to let them have their own way.

CHAPTER VII

SOUTH AFRICA

Before Froude had written the last chapter of The English in Ireland he was visited by the greatest sorrow of his life. Mrs. Froude died suddenly in February, 1874. It had been a perfect marriage, and he never enjoyed the same happiness afterwards. Carlyle and his faithful friend Fitzjames Stephen were the only persons he could see at first, though he manfully completed the book on which he was engaged. It was long before he rallied from the shock, and he felt as if he could never write again. He dreaded ”the length of years which might yet lie ahead of him before he could have his discharge from service.” He took a melancholy pride in noting that none of the reviewers discovered any special defects in those final pages of his book which had been written under such terrible conditions. Mrs. Froude had thoroughly understood all her husband's moods, and her quiet humour always cheered him in those hours of gloom from which a man of his sensitive nature could not escape. She could use a gentle mockery which was always effective, along with her common sense, in bringing out the true proportions of things. Conscious as she was of his social brilliancy and success, she would often tell the children that they lost nothing by not going out with him, because their father talked better at home than he talked anywhere else. Her deep personal religion was the form of belief with which he had most sympathy, and which he best understood, regarding it as the foundation of virtue and conduct and honour and truth. He attended with her the services of the Church, which satisfied him whenever they were performed with the reverent simplicity familiar to his boyhood. Happily he was not left alone. He had two young children to love, and his eldest daughter was able to take her stepmother's place as mistress of his house. With the children he left London as soon as he could, and tried to occupy his mind by reading to them from Don Quixote, or, on a Sunday, from The Pilgrim's Progress. To the end of his life he felt his loss; and when he was offered, fifteen years later, the chance of going back to his beloved Derreen, he shrank from the a.s.sociations it would have recalled.