Koditschek Theodore. Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination: Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

publications like Punch, toget her with a cheap, sensationalist mass-market

press, circula ted derogatory images of dangerous, bestial “Pad dies”

throwing bombs, lowering wages, and infusing their primitive sa vagery

into the heart of the mother isle. The ecclesiastical titles controversy of

1850 came as a match to light these combustible materials. An innocuous

papal plan to divide Britain into diocesan districts unexpectedly detonated

a recessive strain of Anglo-Protestant anti-Catholicism of a virulence that

had not been seen since the eighteenth century.

However, far and away the gravest affront to Britons’ sense of national

integrity came from the Indian Revolt of 1857 , which shook the very

foundations of the British Empire. Whereas Frenchmen, Russians, the

Irish, and even the Pope were Europeans, the Indians had been regarded

as slavish and effeminate orientals, incapable of manly action, and there-

fore properly held under British control. The sudden eruption of these

distant menials onto the pages of British newspapers was therefore a

humiliating event, which provoked metr opolitan readers to a contradic-

tory response: on the one hand, they were outraged at the ingratitude of

miscreants who so violently rejected the British civilizing mission,

while on the other hand, they were shocked at the audacity of subordi-

nates, whose ability to seize their independence had to be taken seriously.

Initially, the revolt precipitated critiques of British misgovernment.

After the Kanpur massacre in July 1857, however, reaction took a more

hysterical, racist tone.

Even sane, sophisticated intellectuals began to

represent Indians as brutal, rapacious beasts. The Earl of Shaftesbury

broadcast (false) reports of children impaled on swords and of women

raped, with eyes, ears, and noses cut out. “The mother’s, the maiden’s

David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial

Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1972), 124–230;

Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London,

1980); Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit: 1850–1980

(Cambridge, 1981). See also James S. Donnelly Jr., The Great Irish Potato Famine (Stroud,

Gloucestershire, 2002); Lynn Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London

(Ithaca, 1979); D. G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford,

1992); Briggs, Victorian People,15–51.

G. B. Malleson, The Mutiny in the Bengal Army: A Historical Narrative by One who has Served

(London, 1858); Charles Ball, History of the Indian Mutiny, 2 vols. (London, 1859). For

British responses to the Revolt, see F. Byrne, “British Opinion and the Indian Revolt,” in

P. C. Joshi, Rebellion, 1857 (Calcutta, 1986); Eugenie Palmegiano, “The Indian Mutiny in

the Mid-Victorian Press,” Journal of Newspaper and Periodical History, 7 (1991), 3–11; Jenny

Sharpe, “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counter-Insurgency,”

Genders, 10 (1991), 25–46; Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race, and

Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914 (Manchester, 1994), 18–51; Gautam

Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge, 2005); Patrick

Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, 1988),

199–296.

Victorian anxieties and Elizabethan adventures 165

wild scream of despair” was rhymed in Punch to “the agonized wail of

babies [which] sickens the air.” Charles Dickens fantasized about being

able “to exterminate the [oriental] Race upon whom the stain of the late

cruelties rested. ” Even Macaulay, ill and nearing the end of his life, was

appalled that “the cruelty of the sepoys” had turned English opinion into

“one terrible cry for revenge.” Worse yet, “the universal feeling that not a

single sepoy within the walls of Delhi should be spared” was a sentiment

“with which I can not help sympathizing.”

For younger, more robust liberals, like Goldwin Smith, however, the

gravest danger of the mutiny lay in the backla sh that it generated within

Britain, and in the bloody retribution that was exacted in its wake: men’s

heads blown off at the mouths of cannons; summary courts martial and

executions throughout the subcontinent; civilian to wns, cities, and vil-

lages looted and pillaged. If British soldiers were allowed to inﬂict such

wanton lawlessness in a distant colony, what repercussions would this

have for civil liberties at home? In this volatile climate, the publication

of Froude’s History could not but have damaging effects. In particular,

Smith objected to Froude’s celebration of Henry VIII, and his eagerness

to excuse that monarch’s most indefensibly repressive acts. Like the law-

less British soldiers in Victorian India, Smith depicted Henry as a sangui-

nary despot who habitually resorted to repression and murder to fuel

his wanton ambitions and lusts. By repeatedly excusing Henry’s depre-

dations as “reasons of state,” Froud e was paving the way for a revival of

dictatorship in modern times. “A conviction on the unsupported evidence

of the counsel of the Crown seems to him a perfectly conclusive, though

harsh mode of condemnation ...The most tainted witness is good enough

to convict a ‘traitor’ ... if ‘the pressure of the times’ means a conviction is

useful.” To Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Thomas

Cromwell – to both Catholics and Protestants at varying times – Henry

had only one message: “It is not the obedience of the outward act only that

the king requires, but the obedience of the soul. To hang draw and quarter

you is a ‘necessity’ ... you are on the wrong side. You are ‘guilty of not

being able to read the signs of the times.’”

Quote from Shaftesbury in Chakravarty, Indian Mutiny, 37; from Punch and Dickens in

Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 205 and 207, respectively; from Macaulay in TLL, II: 359–

60. Laura Peters, “‘Double-Dyed Traitors and Infernal Villains’: Illustrated London News,

Household Words, Charles Dickens and the Indian Rebellion,” in David Finkelstein and

Douglas Peers (eds.), Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media (London, 2000),

110–34; Nancy Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial

Imagination (New Brunswick, 1999), 109–65; Rudranishu Mukherjee, “‘Satan Let Loose

upon Earth’: The Kanpur Massacres of 1857,” Past and Present, 128 (1990), 92–116.

Goldwin Smith, “Review of Froude’s History of England,” Edinburgh Review, 219 (July,

1858), 206–52, quotes on 210 and 242.

166 Re-imagining a Greater Britain

Convinced that he had correctly read the signs of the times, Froude

responded to Smith’s criticisms in the September 1858 issue of Fraser’s

Magazine. Mawki sh liberals like Smith took for granted the freedoms that

others had previously earned with their blood. In saving the nation from

civil war, Henry’s harsh measures had preserved more victims than they

had destroyed. Imagine, Froude asks his readers, what would have hap-

pened if the Chartist radicals, Irish rebels, and French revolutionaries

had been able to join forces in 1848? “Ver y strong measures of repression

would without doubt have been resorted to.” Imagine, he challenges

them again, what will be the future of consequences of a better-organized

Indian Mutiny? Russia would almost certainly take advantage of Britain’s

discomﬁture. “Let the conspiracy have spread along the frontiers; let

Persians and Afghans on one side, let the Burmese on the other, have

entered into the same scheme.” Would any respon sible British Viceroy

desist from the most strenuous measures? “God forbid that any man

be sent to govern India who would hesitate at such a crisis to adopt any

measures of repression whi ch would prove really effective.” Yet Froude

feared that the actual mutiny would soon be forgotten. British opinion

would again subside into ﬂaccid complacency, and meaningful measures

of imperial security would be abandoned, “held up as willful tyranny,

an enormous oppression of which the mutiny was the legitimate

consequence.”

This dispute between Smith and Froude was symptomatic of a funda-

mental cha nge in attitude that can be det ected in many other quarters

as well. The liberal imperialism of the previous half-century was not

necessarily rejected, but it was increasingly questioned as an expensive

luxury that a beleaguered power like Britain could not always afford.

In this new political and intellectual climate, a historian like Froude

could enjoy a rhetorical advantage over one like Macaulay, since the

imperial vi olence that drove the latter to defensiveness and extenuation

could be simply accepted by the former as the way of the world. To

Froude’s thinking, Empire was inherently coercive, sustained by threat

of violence and grounded in conquest. Liberals who believed otherwise

were simply deluding themselves and endangering national and imperial

security with their naiveté. Progress and peace might indeed be attained

in the long run, but they could be achieved only through the exercise

of benevolent despotism.

For the historian, this recognition of the

J. A. Froude, “The Edinburgh Review and Mr. Froude’s History,” Fraser’s Magazine,58

(September, 1858), 359–78, quotes on 375, 376–7, and 377. See also Goldwin Smith’s

counter-rebuttal in Edinburgh Review, 220 (October, 1858), 586–94.

Froude, “Progress,” 671–90.

Victorian anxieties and Elizabethan adventures 167

continuity of the British Empire had a felicitous and empowering effect. It

meant that the history of the nation and its Empire would always

be relevant to the future of the nation and its Empire in a direct and

unmediated way. The harsh lessons of the past must not be forgotten,

because the world remain ed a harsh and unforgi ving pla ce.

Froude’s interest in the Empire rose in direct proport ion as he came to

appreciate that it represented a necessary bulwark against (and a distrac-

tion from) the broils of Europe. Yet before Froude could set his narrative

sails into the Atlantic, he had to return to the Westminster court in 1558,

to take the measure of the new Virgin Queen. In “Forgotten Worthies,” he

had cast Elizabeth as successor to her father’s heroic role. “The ﬁgure of

this solitary woman braving and ruling the tempest, surrounded by

conspiracies, the special hate of the Ca tholic world, and pursued in her

grave by the foulest calumnies, made intelligible to me the enthusiasm

with which she was worshipped by the noblest of her subjects.” Yet as

Froude pursued his researches deeper into the archives, he became

increasingly disenchanted with this woman at the helm. On a personal

level, she was mood y and dangerously indecisive. In contrast to her

father’s strategic tackings between right and left, Elizabeth’s vacillations

appeared as marks of weakness. Her brilliant playing-off of one potential

husband against another failed to impress Froude, who was obs essed with

the need for a legitimate heir.

For Froude, Elizabeth was most satisfactory as a monarch when she

deferred to her ablest Protestant male advisors – especially William Cecil,

but also Francis Walsingham, Henry Sidney, Francis Bacon, and the

Scottish Earls of Morton and Murray. Yet these stolid politiques could

never become the dominant ﬁgures that Macaulay would have made

them. Ever searching for the via media – the rationalist center – these

stay-at-home bureaucrats, howsoever brilliant, were lacking in the requi-

site Froudian adventurousness and panache. In “Forgotten Wo rthies,”

Froude had looked to the great privateering seamen Thomas Cobham,

Richard Grenville, Walter Raleigh, the Hawkins brothers, and Francis

Drake to lend heroic stature to the Elizabethan epoch. Bold, audacious,

and romantically amoral, these Devonshire countrymen did seem poised

to launch a new narrat ive by circumnavigating the globe. Operating

on their own, they served both themselves and the nation by seizing

the ill-gotten gains of the enemy and by bearding the Spaniard on the

bounding blue: “The Sword of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of

Peru; the legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting

Froude, “England’s Forgotten Worthies,” quote from Froude’s autobiographical frag-

ment in DF, I: 172; FHE, VII: 1–540, VIII: 1–483.

168 Re-imagining a Greater Britain

the gold-s hips on their passage ... Thus, from a combination of causes,

the whole force and energy of the age was directed towards the sea.” This

appealing romance of patriotic swashbuckling would be taken to the hilt

by Froude’s brother-in-law Charles Kingsley, in his novel Westward Ho!

Yet for Froude the historian, following the lead of his sources, a more

complex and circuitous journey was required. England’s way out into the

imperial future ran through the British archipelago, where the forces of

chaos and retrogression still raged uncontrolled.

4 Protestantism and the British Union

Although Froude regarded the creation of Britain as one of the greatest

achievements in human history, he did not delude either himself or his

readers into believing that it arose from benevolent motives. England

had habitually meddled in the affairs of its Celtic neighbors throughout

the middle ages, but the imperatives to do so greatly increased during the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was the break with Rome and the

rise of French and Spanish super-states that suddenly transformed these

frontier kingdoms into zones of contestation. They now became vulner-

able marchlands that Protestant England would have to master, or else

risk being perpetually threatened, invaded, and undermined by them.

In Froude’s Elizabethan narrative this imperative becomes so powerful

that it reshapes the very m eaning of Protestantism itself. The spiritual

force that we ﬁrst encountered in the reign of Henry now re-emerges as a

binding political instrument, which draws Scotland and England together

so as to prevent the northern kingdom from falling into the French,

Catholic camp.

As always, Henry had tried to lay the foundations with his great

victories at Flodden (1513) and Solway Moss (1542). However, his

proposals for a marital union of the crowns was rebuffed by the

Scottish nobles, who were still trapped in a feudal mentality.

It was

only the spread of Presbyterianism among the Scottish middle class that

brought the goal of Anglo-Scottish Union back into view from the 1560s

onward. “What Kings and Parliament had done in England, in Scotland

had to be accomplished by the people, and was accomplished therefore

with the passionate feature s of a revolt against authority.” Under the

Froude, “England’s Forgotten Worthies,” 370–1; Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! [1855]

(London, n.d.).

For Froude’s treatment of Anglo-Scottish relations see FHE, IV: 1–6, 30–46, 105–228, 306,

V: 31–98, VII: 101–3, 121, 159, 165, 177–200, 258, 269, 324–5, 359–90, 531, VIII: 154–67,

168, 176, 247, 261–8, 284, 295, 334–71, IX: 1–297, 403, 546–98, X: 456, 460, 468–70, XI:

130, 266–310 , 462–558, XII: 91–120, 203, 204–343.

Protestantism and the British Union 169

leadership of Knox and other charismatic preachers, however, this revolt

was diverted from destructive, revolutionary channels into a new kind of

creative political nationalism, “with relations too close now to be dis-

owned.”

In Ireland, by contras t, the path of union proved inﬁnitely

more painful. From the outset, all of Froude’s anti-Celtic preju dices are

on display. The Irish population’s refusal to embrace the Reformation is

taken as a mark of their intrinsically savage character. For them,

Catholicism is less a religion than a form of idolatry – of a piece with

their retention of Brehon Law, their incessant feuding, and their con-

genital idleness. The trade-off for turning Protestantism into the polit-

ical glue of Anglo-Scottish union is that difference of religion in Ireland

will always remain a barrier against any future fusion of civi lization and

polity. Where Scotland was the country that could be absorbed but

never conquered, Ireland became the country that had to be repeatedly

conquered, because it could not be absorbed. Where the Scots were

ﬁerce warriors, transformed into bulwarks of Britain, the Irish remained

ungovernable savages whose proximity portended a dark future of

British disunity.

Yet Froude’s relentless assault on the character and culture of the

Irish is subtly subverted by a secret desire for the very disorder and

enchantment that Ireland is made to represent. Ireland is not merely

chaotic; it is also seductive, and therefore destructive of English sobri-

ety. In England and Scotland, the Saxons and Normans conquered the

Celts. In Ireland, however, the conquering Normans and Saxons were

Celticized.

What accounts for this Irish seduction? Unable to answer

this question, Froude can only lament that Ireland is a problem that

England will never resolve. Since they can neither a bsorb nor abandon

the neighboring island, the English are condemned to reconquering

it again and again. In Ireland, even the great Henry met his match.

“Sadder history in the compass of the world’s great chronicle there

is none,” the historian shakes his head, “so coura geous, yet so like

cowards; so interesting yet so resolute to forfeit all honorable claims to

interest.”“The Irish spirit,” he writes with more genuine understand-

ing, was attractive “in virtue of representing certain p erennial tendencies

of humanity which are latent in all mankind ... an imp atience of control,

adeliberatepreferencefordisorder, a determination in each individual

man to go his own way, whether it was a good way or a bad, and a reckless

hatred of industry.”

FHE, IV: 55, VII: 104, 159, IX: 236.

FHE, IV: 66.

FHE, II: 248–326, IV: 66–105, V: 414–36, X: 477–561, XI: 173–265, quotes on II: 258,

320; see also X: 477.

170 Re-imagining a Greater Britain

To Froude, everything that was wrong with Elizabethan Ireland – and

the Irish – was encapsulated in the ﬁgure of the Ulster chieftain Shan

O’Neil. Shan had risen within his clan under suspicious circumstances.

He retained the old Brehon Law, and his power rested on resistance

to English practices of primogeniture. Worse yet, he retained the old

system of communal property in the land. According to Froude, Shan

spent most of his time feuding with other chieftains, burning and plunder-

ing their peoples’ crops, and intrigui ng to marry their daughters and

wives. Unlike the Earl of Ormond, who deferred with cringing servility

to the English masters, and the Earl of Desmond, who rose in glorious,

futile revolt, Shan utterly deﬁ ed the Tudors’ (and Froude’s) anglocentric

agenda. When it was in his interest, he co-operated with the English,

while secretly conspiring with the Spanish and French. When it suited,

he could play the suffering Catholic, while simultaneously providing

aid and cov er to the Protestant corsairs – whom he resembled more than

any other ﬁgure in Froude’s book.

Yet where Froude’s pulse ardently

quickens with the adventures of the sea-rovers, his blood pressure mere ly

explodes at the impertinences of Shan. When the English Deputy, Sussex,

sent an army to gain control of lawless Ulster, Shan was forced to go to

London, where he wooed the Queen with impudent letters, begging

for forgiveness and reminding her that he was only a poor savage who

wanted to become civilized. In 1563, restored and forgiven, Shan quickly

returned to his habitual ways. Confronted with a conventional military

assault by the new Deputy, Sidney, he remade himself into an effe ctive

guerilla warrior, disappearing into the countryside whenever the troops

approached.

In the end, of course, Shan went too far. Once his head was safely

perched atop the gate of Dublin Castle, however, the English imperialists

had to consider how to prevent any successor from replicating his feats.

For Ireland’s Highland warriors there would be no Scott-like romance

of reconciliation or inclusionary British future. As the Elizabethan

statesmen contemplated their conundrum they saw only one solution

to the Irish morass: wholesale colonization by enterprising English or

Scottish Protestant immigrants, who would either civilize the natives or

root them out.

The exclusive right of a savage population over lands which they will not cultivate is

always disputable. The Irish chiefs might be held to have forfeited such title as they

possessed by their repeated rebellions, and might be fairly required to surrender

a part of their domains as the price of their pardon. A thousand English soldiers

FHE, VIII: 1–57, 372–421.

FHE, VIII: 385–421, 38–9.

Protestantism and the British Union 171

who had been just dismissed were ready made for the purpose; there were many

“husbandmen, ploughwrights, cartwrights, smiths, and carpenters” among them.

The Irish, according to this program, “were to become ‘civil’ and

‘industrious,’ or else ‘through idleness would offend and die.’” When

Irish nobles, like the hitherto loyal Butlers, objected to such proceedings,

the colonists simply mas sacred their families wholesale. Though indefen-

sible, such behavior was not illogical, as Froude points out. “The dead do

not come back; and if the mothers and babies are slaughtered with the

men, the race gives no further trouble.”

Faced with such genocidal scenes and sentiments, even Froude is

eventually moved to disgust: “It cannot be said that England deserved

to keep a country which it mismanaged so disastrously. The Irish were not

to be blamed if they looked to the Pope, to Spain, to France, to any friend

on earth or heaven, to deliver them from a Power which discharged no

single duty that rulers owe to subjects.”

Yet this momentary recognition

of England ’s inhumanity is quickly quashed by Froude’s overriding obses-

sion with England’s security. In the dangerous world of the Counter-

Reformation, English liberty depends on Irish subjugation. It therefore

follows that Irish subjugation must be accomplished by any means.

Froude’s incontrovertibly unhappy Irish ending, I believe, explains

the importance that he attaches to the derring-do of Hawkins, Drake,

and the other seafaring buccaneers. For both hist orian and subjects, the

Atlantic affords an escape from the bitter hatreds and insoluble problems

of sixteenth-century Europe. It opens the way for a happier, healthier,

more uniformly Protestant Greater Britain than was possible within the

conﬁnes of the British Isles. The fact that this transatlantic empire would

be actually achieved in the future only makes it more rhetorically servi-

ceable to Froude. He can use his account of the great buccaneering

exploits to gesture toward an outcome that his readers already kno w. In

this manner, he can evoke the triumphant telos of British America, which

will somehow redeem the contradictions, abuses, and atrocities that

actually accompanied that imperializing project.

Lest his readers notice

the parallels between pirates like Cobham, Hawkins, or Drake and the

disorderly Irish who are being excoriated on alternate pages, Froude

emphasizes the distinctively “Protestant” character of the former.

FHE, X: 484.

FHE, X: 477–563, quotes on 491 and 509.

FHE, X: 517.

FHE, V: 135–40, VIII: 423–83, IX: 359–71,X:1,107–9, 240, 257, 488, XI: 1–15,

368–406. Froude felt a deep personal connection to the sea. He was a skilled and

inveterate yachtsman. Whenever possible, he spent holidays taking sailing trips, ev en

helping to pilot a vessel t o Norway when he wa s in his mid-sixties. DF, II: 505–13;

Paul, Froude, 17, 115, 127, 337, 377–8.

172 Re-imagining a Greater Britain

To themselves they appeared as the elect, to whom God had given the heathen for

an inheritance; they were men of stern intellect and a fanatical faith, who believing

themselves the favourites of providence, imitated the example and assumed the

privileges of a chosen people, and for their wildest and worst acts they could claim

the sanction of religious conviction.

Of course, the danger of turning Protestantism into a justiﬁcation for

plunder and slaughter is that Froude risks further debasing its “spiritual”

content and turning it into a mere instrument of nationalist propaganda

and political expediency. Never mind; once Froude’s narrative sail catches

the wind of his rhetoric there is no turning back.

The merchant of a seaport was driven by his occupation to comprehend and utilise

the knowledge which was breaking upon mankind. To him to live by custom was

bankruptcy and ruin. Unless he could grow with the times, unless he could distin-

guish fact from imagination, and laws of nature from theories of faith, he was left

behind in the race by keener and less devout competitors ... The stars were now

the mariner’s patrons, and the tables of longitude and latitude were his Liturgy.

In this vision of Weber, avant la lettre , the sea-roving Calvinist becomes

a prime agent of modernity. Indeed , when the Eliza bethan Protestant

betakes himself to the expanse of the ocean, the Victorian historian

momentarily seems to embrace that optimistic progress narrative that

Macaulay had associated with Greater Britain unconditionally.

A restless impetuous energy, inventing, expanding, pressing forward into the

future, regarding what has been achieved only as a step or landing-place upwards

and onwards to higher conquests ... A sense that we shall be unworthy of our

ancestors if we do not eclipse them in all that they touched, if we do not draw larger

circles round the compass of their knowledge, and extend our power over nature,

over the world, and over ourselves.

Yet Froude remains enough of a conservative realist to recognize

that he cannot redeem the predatory piracy of the Elizabethan age. The

sixteenth-century English sea-rovers were secondary parasites who fed

on the primary predations of the bullionist Spanish Empire. The fact

that Spaniards had already robbed what the English stole from them

hardly justiﬁes the latter activity. In a soberer mood, Froude himself

understands that the only sustainable defense of the depredations of

the sea-rovers is – as with e very disagreeable feature of the sixteenth

century – reason of state. At a time when the English state was still

beleaguered and weak, the seamen provided an effective – and ofﬁcially

deniable – means of d iverting some small portion of the vast wealth of

Spanish America into Protestant, English channels. While Elizabeth,

FHE, VIII: 480.

FHE, X: 108.

FHE, VIII: 422–3.

Protestantism and the British Union 173

the Queen, was buttering up her Spanish “brother,” Elizabeth, the

private investor, was raking in h er share of the gold bars which had

been purloined from Philip by Hawkins and Drake. From this secondary

theft of what the Spanish Empire itself had stolen, it is a long w ay not

only to mo dern capitalism, bu t even to a British maritime Empire that

could be economically producti ve in a broadly mercantilist, rather than

narrowly bullionist, frame.

Nevertheless, in one respect – by pioneering the slave trade – the sea-

rovers began to evolve new forms of plunder that did preﬁgure the nascent

forms of surplus extraction, which would become characteristic of the

coming mercantilist age. In a scant ﬁfteen pages, Froude tries to explain

away this further blot on Elizabet han Protestant morality.

In the end,

Froude’s sea-rovers enable his History to go out in a blaze of glory, with

the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. It is telling, however, that he

chose not to continue his story beyond this dramatic victory as he had

originally intend ed. Indeed, by bringing a modicum of safety and security

to British Protestantism, the triumph of 1588 opened the way for a new

atmosphere in which the harsh repressive measures of the Tudors would

no longer be required. Macaulay’s story of the struggle for libe rty against

obsolete absolutism, however, is not one that Froude was interested in

taking up. His heart remained in the dark era of the sixteenth century,

when liberty was but a promise, and absolutism was still required. This

was a world of violence and dogmatism, of nightmarish disorder and

autocratic dreams. It was a world of grotesque heresy hunts, of roasting,

burning bodies; of genocidal butcherings of women and children; and

of men screaming under the torture of the rack or the quartering knife.

Yet it was a world in which Froude felt psychologically at home. Victorian

liberals might imagine that this world had been long superseded. Froude

would now try to convince them otherwise.

5 Froude’s Greater British Victorian vision

When Froude completed the last volume of his History, he was middle-

aged and successful, earning over £1,400 per year. In 1861 he had been

tapped as the editor of Fraser’s – a monthly magazine with a circulation of

over 3,000 which weighed in on all the important public issue s of the day.

FHE, XI: 368–406. For a recent historiographical perspective, see J. H. Elliott, Empires of

the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, 2006).

FHE, VIII: 464–83, especially 470, IX: 358–80.

On several occasions Froude acknowledges that Protestants, especially Protestant the-

ologians, could be as bigoted, dogmatic, and authoritarian as their Catholic counter-

parts. FHE, V: 291, VII: 29, 381, VIII: 310, IX: 304, 405.

174 Re-imagining a Greater Britain