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splendour of his ecclesiastical rank, forgotten that he was an Englishman, and yet who repulsed negotiations which might have gained him a matrimonial crown in his native country. We cannot understand why, when at length permission was brought to the enthusiastic legate to return home, he should be sneered at as about to have his eager temperament for ever 'excited either with wild hopes, or equally wild despondency, now fooled to the top of its bent.' The Cardinal's mission was certainly not for the good of England; but its gravity and importance were sufficiently great to make his joy at the licence at last to enter the effect of no vain delusion. Fortunately for his readers, dislike does not mar Mr. Froude's power of description; and it is assuredly all put forth in the narrative of Pole's reconciliation of England to Rome, and the accompanying circumstances. He mentions, but without wasting time in praising it, the Cardinal's magnanimous carelessness about his own interests, and absorbing care for those of his Church, and intimates, somewhat gratuitously, that the popular welcome given to him was not to the papal legate, but the English nobleman. Then the eager catching of the anxious queen at any encouragement for her hopes of offspring, and the equally eager, but not therefore, as the historian seems to think, ridiculous ardour of hope in the returned exile, are well painted; and, still more, the final scene, when, on Saint Andrew's-day, in the dull November afternoon, before the English Parliament and the highest nobles of Spain and Flanders, Queen and King kneeling before the representative of Rome, in dead silence across the dimlylighted hall, while, amidst the hushed breathing, every tone was audible, and at the pauses were heard the smothered sobs ' of the Queen, came the low, awful words of the absolution.' On whom the guilt of the persecution which has made the later years of Mary's reign a byword directly lies, seems doubtful. On Bonner, by a sort of common consent, the odium of the grosser forms of cruelty has been thrown. He had not shrunk from bearing persecution himself well, though not heroically; and his rough, fierce nature, though with an occasionally glancing under-current of good nature, which, in Mr. Froude's account of him, brings to mind Judge Jeffreys, has gained for himself and his famous Coalhouse a very unenviable place in other than children's histories of England. It has not been so readily agreed who were the more statesmanlike and responsible agents in the matter. Mr. Froude considers that the crime of setting the persecution on foot rests with Gardiner, -vindictive, ruthless, treacherous, though in courage indomitable.' It does, in truth, appear that the illegal treatment to which the Bishop of Winchester had been subjected in the last

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reign, had infused into his rather cold nature a yet more complete conviction than that felt by him in Henry's reign, that innovation ought to be, and could be, put down by force. But, as it is observed by Mr. Froude, Gardiner died; but the policy, which the multitude attributed to him as the Queen's prime minister, was still persevered in; and the historian's conclusion therefore is, not simply that it could not have been the work of that individual politician, but that it must have proceeded from some other of the sovereign's advisers. Herself he exonerates to a great degree: Those forlorn hours, when Mary would sit ' on the ground with her knees drawn to her face; those rest'less days and nights when, like a ghost, she would wander ' about the palace galleries, rousing herself only to write tear'blotted letters to her husband; those bursts of fury over the libels dropped in her way; or the marching in procession 'behind the Host in the London streets: these are all the signs ' of hysterical derangement, and leave little room for other feel'ings than pity.' To whom, then, does the charge attach of having guided and hurried on those blind passions and hopes of arousing Heaven's compassion by human sacrifices? To whom did the presiding geniuses of Lollard's Tower and Bonner's Coalhouse look for countenance? At whose door lies the death of Ridley and Latimer, and the sadder shifting to and fro of Cranmer? These were not, we are told, the fruit of Philip's bigotry; the brave Lords of the Council-those outspoken Protestants of Somerset's and Northumberland's train-so long as they could keep the ecclesiastical spoils, would not resist Catholicism; but they did not love it enough to make themselves hateful for its promotion; Bonner was but a tool, who even at times loathed his cruel office; Gardiner himself did not give the sign for the outbreak of fury, till an influence from the Flemish coast seduced him into violence. Pole, then, the historian believes, was the black spirit who, whether in the Netherlands or at Lambeth, ever led the van of the intolerant. It is startling to hear of the subtle intellect and strong sense of Gardiner having been wrought upon so strangely, by the weak enthusiast described by Mr. Froude under the name of Cardinal Pole. It is as surprising to have the mad dreamer taunted for the cowardly caution with which 'he passed by an earl and baron to take the lame, the halt, and the blind, the weaver from his loom, the carpenter 'from his workshop.' It surely must have escaped Mr. Froude, when he wrote this, that he had spoken of the influence of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, three of the Cardinal's alleged victims, as so great, that fears of a fierce popular outbreak had retarded their trial till Philip could get clear of the English

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coasts. To Pole is referred the condemnation of strings of prisoners brought in from the lanes and byways; and he ridicules the appeal to him for justice by Ferrars of S. David's. This prelate, after being imprisoned in the last reign because his talk was chiefly of baking and brewing,' and for such unepiscopal habits as his 'daily using whistling to his child,' and also to the seals on the rocks at Milford Haven, was now sentenced, for grave theological dogmas, in which he does not seem to have taken much more interest than another masculine Christian,' a great friend of Mr. Froude's, who was hanged after the Devonshire rebellion, from his own church-steeple, in full canonicals, the deerpoaching priest of Samford Courtenay, who gave not his head for the polling, nor his beard for the washing.' Ferrars,' says the historian, appealed to the legate; but the legate never listened 'to the prayer of heretics: his mission was to extirpate them.' In vain have preceding historians urged that Pole sometimes lifted up his voice for merciful measures: as when, on the 20th of August, 1556, he delivered from Bonner's grasp a file of threeand-twenty prisoners, led in a string in from Colchester. This, argues the historian, was done only from fear of the popular rage-a likely motive, forsooth, to have influenced so wild a mind as he imputes to Pole. In vain might be urged the unanimous protest of the Council to the jealous Pope Paul IV., against the revocation of the legate's commission: this, it seems, was but sycophancy to the Queen. In vain the fact that the Canterbury tragedies are traceable to Archdeacon Harpfield, who had the superintendence of the diocese till Cranmer's death. The archdeacon, it is said, was but the tool, as though the superior, though, it is to be confessed, legally liable, is always morally so for the harshness of a subordinate. Even his virtues are brought up against him: his character is described as irreproachable; his acts as not the effect of a cruel nature, but of a belief that a denial of Roman Catholic tenets and of the papal supremacy was the greatest crime in the catalogue of sins, and that he was the chosen instrument to check these wickednesses. His virtues, it is declared, sprang from the same stock with the defects in his nature; human instincts and genial emotions had been extinguished in him, though not his enormous vanity; and enthusiasm had usurped the place of understanding, till he was become what seems to be, in Mr. Froude's eyes, the most destructive of characters, the man of an idea.' Such is hardly the view which would be taken of Cardinal Pole by one who had not the phenomena of the Marian persecution to explain. It is to no professional persecutor that the words of Ranke, surely a temperate and competent judge, refer: This 'legate was Reginald Pole, acceptable equally to the Queen,

'the nobles, and the people; moderate, intelligent, and raised 'far above all suspicion of sordid or unworthy purposes; or, again, those of Pope Pius IV.: England we might have retained with perfect ease had Cardinal Pole been supported (by Rome) in his measures.' Some evidence might be afforded even by the fact of the cancelling of his legatine powers by the great patron of the Inquisition, Paul IV.-a persecutor, such as Mr. Froude has imagined Pole to have been, would have been admired by the fierce Caraffa. But Mr. Froude loves to have a central figure upon whom to concentrate his loathing of the idea of a bad age, as Dudley was his ideal of the bad spirit which ruled in the latter days of Edward VI. Bonner was too uncouth and material for the purpose, Philip too used up a type of persecutors, and Gardiner over much of a politician: in Pole he discovers a pure, uncalculating spontaneity of persecuting, and delights to find this united with his hated true Ultramontanism, then and for the last time dominant in England.'

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Mr. Froude's fault is in looking for an individual author of these horrors when a party was in fault. In the days of Edward the extreme Protestants had committed not a few enormities. In the days of Mary the extreme Catholics exacted a still more violent vengeance. They had certainly ringleaders; Bonner may have been one; they had been set in motion by feeling the reins by which they had been checked loosening in the hands of some eminent statesman; perhaps this must rest on Gardiner. But it is most undoubtedly perfectly gratuitous to attempt to trace a guiding influence throughout the whole duration of this storm: the impetus lasted till it had exhausted itself: it did not need, when once stirred, the promptings of man like Pole; and of all men Pole's nature, we should fancy, was the least likely to mix itself in the coarse, material, unvisionary hopes of converting a realm in Smithfield. That he did not lift up his eloquent voice against the blind fury of his party is a charge, heavy we allow, which he must bear. But his crime is negative, not positive; he did not check the crowd, only because he never felt himself of it. What was his own business he believed he understood and could do; he left others to do their part in their own way.

a

The reign of Mary began in doubt and confusion; but all the perils and hazards which heralded her accession were for her glory. Never did a sovereign ascend a throne with a more apparent summons to her to mount it from the great majority of her subjects than Mary I. Never was a demise of the Crown welcomed with more general satisfaction. Her brave endurance of frowns of authority during the reigns of Henry and Edward; the gallant dash for the Crown, which was her right, on the

latter's death; her dauntless bearing throughout Wyatt's insurrection, should have been followed by other consequences than the degradation of having kindled a persecution, and lost the last English possession in France.

We shall gladly hail two fresh volumes from Mr. Froude's pen. So long as he cares to extract such glowing narratives and such pregnant précis of character from tedious State papers he will never be without readers, whether partizans of the positivist or of the individualizing theory of history. But we hardly think that it would be much for the benefit of historical study if the style of historical composition represented by these volumes were to supersede that of which Hallam may be taken as an example. There is certainly no reason in the nature of things why the most brilliant narratives of events should not be attended by the calmest judicial commentary on them; but the two qualities of historical composition require two different sets of intellectual qualities which are not very likely to meet in the same writer. Till the combination do come to pass we must look to other histories than those of this model for the philosophy of history. The distinctions and the relations between two ages and their essential characteristics, can never be learnt out of State papers taken singly, or from the characters of individual men however acutely sifted. These are but the materials from which the conclusion is to be got by careful induction and deduction. It is not enough to offer to the student the particulars, however abundant. Those he must certainly have; but he should also have the historian's own view propounded as collected from the whole mass of details examined, with the reasons on which it is based. Much must be taken on faith; it is impossible to give all the facts upon which the general conception was founded; only some can be furnished to suggest the nature of those not produced; it is altogether idle to bring forward a few scattered sayings or doings as proofs that such or such was the fact, when it may be that there are hundreds still not alleged which would go far to demonstrate the opposite conclusion.