home, and his country, for conscience' sake. He remained true to the
ancient faith in which he was reared. With unerring instinct he foresaw
that, once England was severed from the Papacy, it would be impossible for
king or parliament to stem the flood of the Reformation. For twenty years
he remained an exile on the continent. He returned an old and broken man,
to witness the overthrow of his cherished plans. He was repudiated by the
Pope whose authority he had sacrificed everything to maintain, and in his
old age he suffered the humiliation of being accused of heresy in the court
of Rome. He died the same day as Mary died, with the knowledge that all his
life's labours and sacrifices were come to naught, and that the dominion of
the Roman Church in England was gone for ever. Froude saw none of the
pathos or tragedy of Pole's life. To him the cardinal was a renegade, a
traitor to his country, a mercenary of the Pope, a foreign potentate, a
"hysterical dreamer," who vainly imagined that he was "the champion of
heaven, and the destroyer of heresy."

Froude was, above all, an Englishman. His strongest sympathies went out to
the "God's Englishmen" of Elizabeth's reign, who broke the power of Rome
and Spain, and who made England supreme in Europe. In his first chapter he
describes the qualities of Englishmen with a zest and gusto that drew the
comment from Carlyle that "this seems to me exaggerated: what we call John
Bullish." He described them as "a sturdy, high-hearted race, sound in body
and fierce in spirit which, under the stimulus of those great shins of
beef, their common diet, were the wonder of the age." Carlyle's advice when
he read this passage in proof was characteristic:--"Modify a little:
Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops; Robert Burns on oatmeal
porridge; and Mahomet and the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal."
But the passage stood unmodified, in spite of Froude's regard for his
master.