Froude James Anthony

Froude, James Anthony, was born at Dartington, Devon, in 1818, being the youngest son of the Archdeacon of Totnes. From Westminster he went to Oriel College. Oxford, where his brother, Hurrell Froude was in the thick of the Tractarian movement, with which he for a time also associated himself. He was elected to a fellowship at Exeter College, and in 1844 was ordained a deacon. A change, however, was coming over his religious views, and the publication in 1848 of The Nemesis of Faith led to his resignation of his fellowship and the abandonment of teaching as a career. He now joined the staff of the Westminster Renew, devoting himself also to the collection of materials for his great work, The History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada. The first instalment of the book appeared in 1854, and the twelfth and concluding volume was published in 1870; some of his views - especially as to the elevated character and policy of Henry VIII. - proved inacceptable to popular taste, whilst the inaccuracy of his statements of fact arrayed against him the great majority of professed historians. In the meantime Mr. Froude had reprinted a selection of his most brilliant essays under the title of Short Studies on Great Subjects, and had accepted the editorship of Fraser's Magazine. In 1872 he took advantage of the new Act to rid himself of his deacon's orders, and he spent some time lecturing in the United States in support of Protestant ascendency in Ireland. The pith of these discourses furnished a book on The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century. Lord Beaconsfield sent him in 1874 to South Africa with a view to investigating the causes of Kaffir discontent and formulating a scheme of Colonial federation. Very little resulted from his visit except Two Lectures on South Africa. Biographical sketches of Julius Caesar, John Bunyan, and Thomas a Becket, with some pages of memories of the High Church movement, were all that he gave to the world during the five years preceding 1881, when, as literary executor of Thomas Carlyle, he brought out a history of the first forty years of that sage's life. Two further volumes of Reminiscences were followed next year by the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. The revelations made in these volumes gave rise to much bitter controversy. Oceana came out in 1886, and two years later he took for his theme The English in the West Indies. A novel, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, was published in 1889, whilst A Life of Lord Beaconsfield appeared in 1890. In 1892 Lord Salisbury appointed him to succeed Freeman as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. He died in 1894.