James Anthony Froude facts for kids

Quick facts for kids James Anthony Froude FRSE
Born	(1818-04-23)23 April 1818 Dartington Rectory, Devon, England
Died	20 October 1894(1894-10-20) (aged 76) Woodcot, Kingsbridge, Devon, England
Resting place	Shadycombe Cemetery, Salcombe, Devon
Alma mater	Oriel College, Oxford
Occupation	Historian
Title	Regius Professor of Modern History
Term	1892–1894
Predecessor	Edward Augustus Freeman
Successor	Frederick York Powell
Relatives	William Froude and Hurrell Froude (brothers)

James Anthony Froude FRSE (/fruːd/ frood; 23 April 1818 – 20 October 1894) was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career. Froude turned to writing history, becoming one of the best-known historians of his time for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Inspired by Thomas Carlyle, Froude's historical writings were often fiercely polemical, earning him a number of outspoken opponents. Froude continued to be controversial up until his death for his Life of Carlyle, which he published along with personal writings of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. These publications illuminated Carlyle's often selfish personality, and led to persistent gossip and discussion of the couple's marital problems.

Life and works

Early life and education (1818–1842)

He was the son of Robert Hurrell Froude, archdeacon of Totnes, and his wife Margaret Spedding (d. 1821). James Anthony was born at Dartington, Devon, on 23 April 1818. He was the youngest of eight children, including engineer and naval architect William Froude and Anglo-Catholic polemicist Richard Hurrell Froude, who was fifteen years his elder. By James's third year his mother and five of his siblings had died of consumption, leaving James to what biographer Herbert Paul describes as a "loveless, cheerless boyhood" with his cold, disciplinarian father and brother Richard. He studied at Westminster School from the age of 11 until he was 15; there he was "persistently bullied and tormented". Despite his unhappiness and his failure in formal education, Froude cherished the classics and read widely in history and theology.

Beginning in 1836, he was educated at Oriel College, Oxford, then the centre of the ecclesiastical revival now called the Oxford Movement. Here Froude began to improve personally and intellectually, motivated to succeed by a brief engagement in 1839 (although this was broken off by the woman's father). He obtained a second-class degree in 1840 and travelled to Delgany, Ireland, as a private tutor. He returned to Oxford in 1842, won the Chancellor's English essay prize for an essay on political economy, and was elected a fellow of Exeter College.

Religious development and apostasy (1842–1849)

Title page of The Nemesis of Faith, second edition

Froude's brother Richard Hurrell had been one of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, a group which advocated a Catholic rather than a Protestant interpretation of the Anglican Church. Froude grew up hearing the conversation and ideas of his brother with friends John Henry Newman and John Keble, although his own reading provided him with some critical distance from the movement.

During his time at Oxford and Ireland, Froude became increasingly dissatisfied with the Movement. Froude's experience living with an Evangelical clergyman in Ireland conflicted with the Movement's characterisation of Protestantism, and his observations of Catholic poverty repulsed him. He increasingly turned to the unorthodox religious views of writers such as Spinoza, David Friedrich Strauss, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Goethe, and especially Thomas Carlyle.

Froude retained a favourable impression of Newman, however, defending him in the controversy over Tract 90 and later in his essay "The Oxford Counter-Reformation" (1881). Froude agreed to contribute to Newman's Lives of the English Saints, choosing Saint Neot as his subject. However, he found himself unable to credit the accounts of Neot or any other saint, ultimately considering them mythical rather than historical, a discovery which further shook his religious faith.

Nevertheless, Froude was ordained deacon in 1845, initially intending to help reform the church from within. However, he soon found his situation untenable; although he never lost his faith in God or Christianity, he could no longer submit to the doctrines of the Church. He began publicly airing his religious doubts through his semi-autobiographical works Shadows of the Clouds, published in 1847 under the pseudonym "Zeta", and The Nemesis of Faith, published under his own name in 1849. The Nemesis of Faith in particular raised a storm of controversy, being publicly burned in Oxford, at Exeter College, by William Sewell. Froude was forced to resign his fellowship, and officials at University College London withdrew the offer of a mastership at Hobart Town, Australia, where Froude had hoped to work while reconsidering his situation. Froude took refuge from the popular outcry by residing with his friend Charles Kingsley at Ilfracombe.

His plight won him the sympathy of kindred spirits, such as George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and later Mrs. Humphry Ward. Mrs. Ward's popular 1888 novel Robert Elsmere was largely inspired by this era of Froude's life.

History of England (1850–1870)

At Ilfracombe, Froude met and soon married Charlotte Grenfell, Kingsley's sister-in-law, the daughter of Pascoe Grenfell. The couple moved first to Manchester and then to North Wales in 1850, where Froude lived happily, supported by his friends Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold. Prevented from pursuing a political career because of legal restrictions on deacons (a position which was at the time legally indelible), he decided to pursue a literary career. He began by writing reviews and historical essays, with only sporadic publications on religious topics, for Fraser's Magazine and the Westminster Review. Froude soon returned to England, living at London and Devonshire, in order to research his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, on which he worked for the next twenty years. He worked extensively with original manuscript authorities at the Record Office, Hatfield House, and the village of Simancas, Spain.

Froude's historical writing was characterised by its dramatic rather than scientific treatment of history, an approach Froude shared with Carlyle, and also by Froude's intention to defend the English Reformation (which he asserted was "the hinge on which all modern history turned"; quotes in and the "salvation of England") against the interpretations of Catholic historians. Froude focused on figures such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, although he became increasingly unfavourable to Elizabeth over the course of his research. Furthermore, he directly expressed his antipathy towards Rome and his belief that the Church should be subordinated to the state. As a result, when the first volumes of Froude's history were published in 1856 they drew the ire of liberals (who felt that Froude's depiction of Henry VIII celebrated despotism) and Oxford High Churchmen (who opposed his position on the Church); this hostility was expressed in reviews from the Christian Remembrancer and the Edinburgh Review. The work was a popular success, however, and along with Froude's 1858 repudiation of his early novels helped him regain much of the esteem he had lost in 1849. Following the death of Thomas Macaulay in 1859, Froude became the most famous living historian in England.

In 1862, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.

Beginning in 1864, Edward Augustus Freeman, a High Churchman, launched a critical campaign against Froude in the Saturday Review and later in the Contemporary Review, somewhat damaging Froude's scholarly reputation. In 1879, Freeman's review in the Contemporary Review of Froude's Short Study of Thomas Becket incited Froude to respond with a refutation in The Nineteenth Century which largely discredited Freeman's attacks and reaffirmed the value of Froude's manuscript research.

In 1860, Froude's wife Charlotte died; in 1861, he married her close friend Henrietta Warre, daughter of John Warre, MP for Taunton. Also in 1861, Froude became editor of Fraser's Magazine following the death of former editor John Parker, who was also Froude's publisher. Froude retained this editorship for fourteen years, resigning it in 1874 at the request of Thomas Carlyle, with whom he was working. In 1869 Froude was elected Lord Rector of St. Andrews, defeating Benjamin Disraeli by a majority of fourteen. In 1870, following the passage of the Clerical Disabilities Act (c. 91, Vict. XXXIII & XXXIV; "Bouverie's Act"), which permitted priests and deacons to resign from Holy Orders, Froude was finally able to officially rejoin the laity.

In a prize-winning work published in 1981, the historian J. W. Burrow remarked of Froude that he was a leading promoter of the imperialist excitement of the closing years of the century, but that in the mass of his work even empire took second place to religion.

Looking abroad (1870–1880)

Caricature by Adriano Cecioni published in Vanity Fair in 1872

Soon after the completion of the History of England in 1870, Froude began research for a history of Ireland. As with his earlier work, English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century was opinionated, favouring Protestantism over Catholicism and frequently attempting to justify British rule in Ireland, particularly under Oliver Cromwell; a deeply unpopular figure among Irish Catholics. Froude argued that Ireland's issues were the result of too little control from authorities in London, and that an even greater amount of British control—an "enlightened despotism"—was needed to alleviate problems that were present in Ireland.

In September 1872, Froude accepted an invitation to lecture in the United States, where his work was also well-known. At that time, many Americans (particularly Irish Americans) were opposed to British rule in Ireland, and Froude hoped to change their views. The lectures, widely discussed, raised the expected controversy, with opposition led by the Dominican friar Father Thomas Nicholas Burke. Opposition caused Froude to cut his trip short, and he returned to England disappointed both by his impression of America and by the results of his lectures.

In England, too, Froude's Irish history had its critics, most notably William Edward Hartpole Lecky in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, the first volumes of which were published in 1878, and in reviews in Macmillan's Magazine.

In February 1874, shortly before completion of English in Ireland, Froude's wife Henrietta died, after which Froude moved from London to Wales. As a means of diversion, Froude travelled to the Southern African Colony of Natal, unofficially for Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon, to report on the best means of promoting a confederation of the colonies and states of southern Africa. This region, seen as vital for the security of the Empire, was only partially under British control. Confederating the various states under British rule was seen as the best way of peacefully establishing total imperial control and ending the autonomy of the remaining independent states.

Colonial Secretary Lord Carnavon

On his second trip to Southern Africa in 1875, Froude was an imperial emissary charged with promoting confederation, a position which conflicted at times with his habit for lecturing on his personal political opinions. In the Cape Colony, his public statements advocating the use of forced labour on the indigenous Xhosa people were particularly controversial, all the more so as the Cape Colony at the time was under the rule of the relatively inclusive Molteno-Merriman Government, whose stated policy was to treat its Xhosa citizens as "fellow subjects with white men", and which was accused of being "rabid in its anti-Imperialist stance". Relations were not improved by Froude's disdain for the Cape's local politics and of the "Cape politicians [who] strut about with their Constitution as a schoolboy newly promoted to a tail coat, and...imagine that they have the privileges of perfect independence, while we are to defend their coasts and keep troops to protect them in case of Kaffir insurrection." Overall, though, the confederation scheme as promoted by Carnavon was not popular in the Southern African states, which were still simmering from the last bout of British imperial expansion (President Brand of the Orange Free State refused outright to even consider it).

However, in his travels through different parts of southern Africa, Froude gained some support through publicly agitating for pet local causes. "Chameleon-like, his politics assumed the colour of his surroundings", was how the Cape Argus newspaper described his strategy.

The Cape Colony was by far the largest and most powerful state in the region, and Froude thus sought audience with its prime minister, John Molteno, to convey Carnarvon's request that he lead the region's states into Carnarvon's confederation scheme. However, Molteno rebuffed Froude, telling him that the confederation attempt was premature, that the country was "not ripe for it", and that his government would not support it in the politically volatile region. He made the additional point that any federation with the illiberal Boer republics would endanger the rights and franchise of the Cape's black citizens, and that overall "the proposals for confederation should emanate from the communities to be affected, and not be pressed upon them from outside."

Prime Minister of the Cape, Sir John Molteno

Froude responded by openly allying with a radical white opposition party, the "Eastern Cape Separatists", promising a baronetcy to its leader Paterson if he would overthrow the Cape's elected government. In a public speech on 25 July 1876, challenging the Cape Government, he declared, "We want you to manage your natives as they do in Canada and Australia". He also promised to create a separate white Eastern Cape, and to impose a forced labour system onto the Cape's African population along "Transvaal lines" while confiscating Xhosa and Basotho land for redistribution to white farmers. Molteno, furious, condemned Froude's statements, accused Froude of imperial interference in the Cape Colony's democracy, and told the Colonial Office that he was prepared to sacrifice his job to keep the Cape out of such a confederation. Meanwhile, Merriman wrote to London accusing the "Imperial Agent" of desiring to subject and exterminate the Cape's Xhosa citizens. The Ministers of the Cape Parliament went on to accuse Carnarvon of attempting to use the Cape to oppress the region and bring upon a war with the neighbouring Xhosa and Boer states. After Merriman confronted Froude in person, at an Uitenhage event which degenerated into fist fights, Froude gave no further public speeches.

Froude's mission was thus ultimately considered unsuccessful, and caused considerable uproar in southern Africa – although Lord Carnarvon nonetheless pushed ahead with his Confederation plan, which predictably failed and led to the confederation wars.

Froude's observations on Africa were presented in a Report to the Secretary of State and a series of lectures for the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, both of which were adapted into essays for inclusion in Froude's essay collection Short Studies on Great Subjects.

In 1876 he was appointed to two Royal Commissions, the first into the "Laws and Regulations relating to Home, Colonial, and International Copyright" and the second "into various matters connected with the Universities of Scotland".

Froudacity

Front cover of Froudacity (1889)

Following completion of the Life of Carlyle, Froude turned to travel, particularly to the British colonies, visiting South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and the West Indies. From these travels he produced two books, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies (1886) and The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1888), which mixed personal anecdotes with Froude's thoughts on the British Empire. Froude intended with these writings "to kindle in the public mind at home that imaginative enthusiasm for the Colonial idea of which his own heart was full". However, these books caused great controversy, stimulating rebuttals and the coining of the term Froudacity by Afro-Trinidadian intellectual John Jacob Thomas, who used it as the title of, Froudacity. West Indian fables by J. A. Froude explained by J. J. Thomas, his book-length critique of The English in the West Indies.

Later life (1885–1894)

During this time Froude also wrote a historical novel, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, which was the least popular of his mature works. As with his earlier book on Irish history, Froude used the book to turn an Irish hero into a villain with historical distortion. On the death of his adversary Edward Augustus Freeman in 1892, Froude was appointed, on the recommendation of Lord Salisbury, to succeed him as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. The choice was controversial, for Froude's predecessors had been amongst his harshest critics, and his works were generally considered literary works rather than books suited for academia. Nevertheless, his lectures were very popular, largely because of the depth and variety of Froude's experience and he soon became a Fellow of Oriel. Froude lectured mainly on the English Reformation, "English Sea-Men in the Sixteenth Century", and Erasmus.

The demanding lecture schedule was too much for the ageing Froude. In 1894 he retired to Woodcot in Kingsbridge, Devonshire. He died on 20 October 1894 and is buried in Salcombe Cemetery.

Family

Froude was married twice: firstly in 1849 to Charlotte Maria Grenfell (d.1860); secondly in 1861 to Henrietta Elizabeth Wade (d.1874). He was survived by one daughter (Margaret) of his first wife Charlotte Maria, née Grenfell, and by a son (Ashley Anthony Froude, C.M.G.) and a daughter (May) of his second wife Henrietta Elizabeth, née Warre.

Ashley Anthony Froude was born in 1863 at Paddington, London, England. He married Ethel Aubrey Hallifax, daughter of Albert Praed Hallifax and Isabella Aubrey Coker, in 1897 at Chelsea, London, England. He died on 17 April 1949. He was appointed Companion, Order of St. Michael and St. George (C.M.G.) and held the office of Justice of the Peace (J.P.). His son, John Aubrey Froude (b. 1898, d. 22 September 1914), died when H.M.S. Cressy was torpedoed by U.9.

Works

Fiction

• Froude, James Anthony (1847). Shadows of the Clouds. London: J. Ollivier. https://archive.org/details/shadowsofclouds00frourich.
• Froude, James Anthony (1879). The Nemesis of Faith. New York: D. M. Bennett. download
• Froude, James Anthony (1889). The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. New York: C. Scribnerʹs Sons. https://archive.org/details/twochiefsdunboy02frougoog.

Non-fiction

• Froude, James Anthony (1856–1870). History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. in 12 volumes. C. Scribner and company. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/007138047. Vol 1 Vol 2; Vol 3
  • Revised as History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, in 12 volumes (1893)
• Froude, James Anthony (1867–1882). Short Studies on Great Subjects.
  • The Oxford Counter-Reformation (1881)
• Froude, James Anthony (1873). The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. Scribner, Armstrong. p. 445. https://archive.org/details/englishinireland01frouuoft.
• Froude, James Anthony (1879). Caesar: A Sketch. https://archive.org/details/biographyofcaesa1954frou. (biography of Julius Caesar)
• Froude, James Anthony (1880). Bunyan. https://archive.org/details/cu31924013169937. (Biography of John Bunyan)
• Froude, James Anthony, ed. (April 1881). "Review of Reminiscences by Thomas Carlyle". The Quarterly Journal 151: 385–428.
• Froude, James Anthony (1882). Thomas Carlyle. New York, C. Scribner's sons. https://archive.org/details/thomascarlyleah05frougoog.
• "Review of Thomas Carlyle: a History of the First Forty Years of his Life, 1795–1835 by J. A. Froude, 1882 and Thomas Carlyle: a History of his Life in London, 1834–1881 by J. A. Froude, 1884". The Quarterly Review 159: 76–112. January 1885. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924065563524;view=1up;seq=88. Volume 1 Volume 2
• Froude, James Anthony (1884). Luther: A Short Biography. https://archive.org/details/luthershortbiogr00frou. (biography of Martin Luther)
• Froude, James Anthony (1886). Historical Essays. https://archive.org/details/historicalessays00frourich.
• Froude, James Anthony (1886). Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies. https://archive.org/details/oceanaorenglandh00frouiala.
• Froude, James Anthony (1888). The English in the West Indies or The Bow of Ulysses. Longmans, Green, and Co. https://archive.org/details/englishinwestin01frougoog.
• Froude, James Anthony (1890). Lord Beaconsfield. https://archive.org/details/lordbeaconsfield00infrou. (Biography of Benjamin Disraeli)
• Froude, James Anthony (1914). The Earl of Beaconsfield. https://archive.org/details/earlofbeaconsfie00frourich.
• Froude, James Anthony (1891). The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon. New York, C. Scribner's sons. https://archive.org/details/divorceofcathari00frou.
• Froude, James Anthony (1894). Life and Letters of Erasmus. New York Scribner. https://archive.org/details/lifelettersofera00frouuoft.
• Froude, James Anthony (1895). English Sea-Men in the Sixteenth Century. https://archive.org/details/englishseamencent00frouuoft.
• Froude, James Anthony (1887). My Relations with Carlyle (published 1903). https://archive.org/details/myrelationswithc00frouuoft.

Translations

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften) (1854, published anonymously)