Holding Henry VIII., with all his faults, to have been the champion of the laity against the clergy, of spiritual and intellectual freedom against the Roman yoke, he could not represent him as a monster of wickedness, trampling on morality for his own selfish ends.

Doing full justice to the conscientiousness of Mary Tudor, excusing her more than some think she ought to be excused, he depicted the heroes of her bloody reign not only in Latimer and Ridley, but in the scores and hundreds of lowlier persons who died for the faith of Christ.
-- * "Shall we say that there is no such thing as truth or error, but that anything is true to a man which he troweth?
and not rather, as the solution of a great mystery, that truth there is, and attainable it is, but that its rays stream in upon us through the medium of our moral as well as our intellectual being ?"--Newman's Grammar of Assent, p.

311.
-- Protestant as he was, however, Froude was an Englishman first and a Protestant afterwards.

One might say of his history, as was said of the drama which Tennyson founded upon the fifth and sixth volumes, that the true heroine is the English people.

Much of his popularity was due to his patriotism and his Protestantism.