Reformation was an infamous crime, and Henry VIII. was worse than the
Bluebeard of the nursery. His hero was Thomas à Becket. He wrote a sketch
of his life and career, which he did not live to finish. His friends
ill-advisedly published it after his death. His ideal ecclesiastical
statesman of modern times was Archbishop Laud. Charles I. was a martyr, and
the Revolution of 1688 an inglorious blunder. To the day of his death--in
spite of the harsh discipline which he received at his hands in boyhood, in
spite of wide divergence of opinion in later years in all matters secular
and religious--Froude never ceased to worship at his brother's shrine. Out
of regard for his memory, more than from any passionate personal
conviction, he associated himself while at Oxford with the Anglican
movement. His affectionate admiration for Newman, neither time nor change
served to impair. If Carlyle was his prophet in later years, his influence
happily did not affect his style. That was based on the chaste model of
Newman. He owed his early friendship with Newman to that great man's
association with Hurrell Froude. Many years after, when Freeman had
venomously accused him of "dealing stabs in the dark at a brother's almost
forgotten fame"--poor Froude's offence was that he dared to write an essay
on Thomas à Becket--he defended himself with rare emotion against the
charge. "I look back upon my brother," he said, "as on the whole the most
remarkable man I have ever met in my life. I have never seen any
person--not one--in whom, as I now think him, the excellences of intellect
and character were combined in fuller measure."

As Froude's powers developed and matured, and as his experience of the
world broadened, he cast away his brother's yoke, and reverted more to his
father's school of thought. As his father was to him the ideal clergyman of
the Church of England, so the Church before 1828 remained to him the model
of what an established religion should be. He was a thorough Erastian, who
believed in the subordination of the Church to the state. He detested