Thomas Cromwell had served him as few ministers have served a king; to him
was due--or, at least, he was the capable instrument of--the policy which
has given distinction to Henry's reign; but he was delivered over to his
enemies when the king's caprice had shifted to another quarter. Even Froude
finds it difficult to excuse the execution of More and Cromwell. But,
having once made up his mind to make a hero of Henry, he goes on with it
bravely to the end. He hides nothing, he excuses nothing, he extenuates
nothing. Neither the death of the aged Countess of Salisbury or of the
gallant Earl of Surrey, nor the illegal imprisonment of the aged Norfolk,
the hero of Flodden, shakes his faith in his hero-king. He even relates,
with minute detail, how a few days before the king's death, four poor
persons, one of whom was a tailor, were burnt at the stake for denying the
Real Presence. But his final comment on it all was: "His personal faults
were great, and he shared, besides them, in the errors of his age; but far
deeper blemishes would be but scars upon the features of a sovereign who in
trying times sustained nobly the honour of the English name, and carried
the commonwealth securely through the hardest crisis in its history."

When a young man Froude had been elected Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.
This entailed his taking holy orders, though he does not seem to have
regularly performed the duties of a clergyman. In 1849 he published his
first book, _The Nemesis of Faith_, now happily forgotten. It raised an
immediate commotion. It was denounced as heretical, and the senior tutor of
Exeter burnt it during a lecture in the College Hall. Froude resigned his
Fellowship, and his connection with the university was severed for
thirty-three years. He was one of the first to take advantage of the
alteration of the law which enabled a clergyman to resign his orders. In
1892 he went back to Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern History. "The
temptation of going back to Oxford in a respectable way," he said, "was too
much for me." He died on October 20, 1894, and on his tombstone he is