FROUDE, JAMES ANTHONY English historian, son of R. H. Froude, archdeacon of Totnes, was born at Dartington, Devon, on April 23, 1818. He was educated at West minster and Oriel college, Oxford, then the centre of the ecclesias tical revival, and was elected a fellow of Exeter college (1842). Froude joined the High Church party and helped J. H. Newman, afterwards cardinal, in his Lives of the English Saints. He was ordained deacon in 1845. By that time his religious opinions had begun to change, he grew dissatisfied with the views of the High Church party, and came under the influence of Carlyle's teaching. Signs of this change first appeared publicly in his Shadows of the Clouds (1847), published under the pseudonym of "Zeta," and his complete desertion of his party was declared a year later in his Nemesis of Faith.
On the demand of the college he resigned his fellowship at Oxford. The first two volumes of his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada appeared in 1856, and the work was completed in 187o. Froude held that the office of the historian was simply to record human actions and that history should be written as a drama. Accordingly he gives promi nence to the personal element in history. His work is often marred by prejudice and incorrect statements. The keynote of his History is contained in his assertion that the Reformation was "the root and source of the expansive force which has spread the Anglo Saxon race over the globe." Hence he overpraises Henry VIII. and others who forwarded the movement, and speaks too harshly of some of its opponents. A strong anti-clerical prejudice is mani fest in his historical work generally, and is doubtless the result of the change in his views on church matters and his abandonment of the clerical profession. Carlyle's influence on him may be traced both in his admiration for strong rulers and strong government, which led him to write as though tyranny and brutality were excusable, and in his independent treatment of character. His rehabilitation of Henry VIII. was a useful corrective, but his repre sentation of him as the minister of his people's will is founded on the false theory that the preambles of the acts of Henry's parlia ments represented the opinions of the educated laymen of England. He was not a judge of evidence, and seems to have been unwilling to admit the force of any argument or the authority of any statement which militated against his case. He worked diligently at original manuscript authorities at Simancas, the Record Office and Hatfield House ; but he used his materials carelessly, and evidently brought to his investigation of them a mind already made up as to their significance. He was constitutionally inaccurate, and seems to have been unable to represent the exact sense of a document which lay before him, or even to copy from it correctly.
Few more brilliant pieces of historical writing exist than Froude's description of the coronation procession of Anne Boleyn through the streets of London, few more full of picturesque power than that in which he relates how the spire of St. Paul's was struck by lightning; and to have once read is to remember for ever the touching and stately words in which he compares the monks of the London Charterhouse preparing for death to the Spartans at Thermopylae. Proofs of his power in the sustained narration of stirring events are abundant ; his treatment of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of the sea fight at St. Helena and the repulse of the French invasion, and of the murder of Rizzio, are among the most con spicuous examples of it. Nor is he less successful when recording pathetic events, for his stories of certain martyrdoms, and of the execution of Mary queen of Scots, are told with exquisite feeling and in language of well-restrained emotion. And his characters are alive. We may not always agree with his portraiture, but the men and women whom he saw exist for us instinct with the life with which he endows them and animated by the motives which he attributes to them. His successes must be set against his fail ures. At least he wrote a great history, one which can never be disregarded by future writers on his period, be their opinions what they may; which attracts and delights a multitude of readers, and is a splendid example of literary form and grace in historical composition.
On the death of his adversary Freeman in 1892, Froude was appointed to succeed him as regius professor of modern history at Oxford. His lectures on Erasmus and other 16th-century subjects were largely attended. He died on Oct. 20, 1894. His long life had been full of literary work. For 14 years he was editor of Fraser's Magazine. He was one of Carlyle's literary executors, and brought some sharp criticism upon himself by publishing Carlyle's Remi niscences and the Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, for they ex hibited the domestic life and character of his old friend in an unpleasant light. Carlyle had given the manuscripts to him, telling him that he might publish them if he thought it well to do so, and at the close of his life agreed to their publication. He also wrote Thomas Carlyle: a History of the First Forty Years of His Life (1882) and Thomas Carlyle, a History of His Life in London (1884) ; Short Studies on Great Subjects (1867-82) ; and an his torical novel, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1889). He was twice married. His first wife, a daughter of Pascoe Grenfell and sister of Mrs. Charles Kingsley, died in 186o ; his second, a daughter of John Warre, M.P. for Taunton, died in 1874.
See H. Paul, Life of J. A. Froude 0905).